Screenwriters from the United States

5938 quotes found

"I was on a talk show recently, and the host asked me, "What do you think about the dope problem?" I said, "Definitely, I feel we have too many dopes." No question about it. That's why we have a drug problem, I feel; it's because everyone has access to drugs...it's all those DRUG stores, right? Every three or four blocks, there's a big sign: "DRUGS", "Open All Night – DRUGS", "We Deliver – DRUGS", "Cut-rate DRUGS"... it's the biggest thing on their sign: "Cosmetics – Sundries – DRUGS"."

- George Carlin

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"When they talk about drugs, they don't talk about all of them. They never mention coffee. The low end of the speed spectrum, I grant you, but there are coffee freaks. And they're walking around, nobody worrying about it."

- George Carlin

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"Birth control pills are still on prescription. You still need a note to get laid."

- George Carlin

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"Some day birth control will come off prescription, and they'll need those cute little catchy names like the patent medicines have...some day birth control pills will have names like, "Preg-Not"! Doctors prefer "Embry-No"! Here's one for the ladies, "Nary-A-Carry"! Something lofty and poetic: "Nay Family Way"; something earthy and crude: "Mom Bomb"; something for the youngsters, "Junior Miss"; here's a real man's product, "Inconceivable"! "Mommy-Not", "Fetus Fail", "Kiddie Kill", "Papa Stopper", "Womb Broom", "Humpty Dumpty"... I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a birth control pill that doesn't work all the time; they'd call it "Baby Maybe"!"

- George Carlin

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"And athletes, athletes got into uppers, college athletes. The right wing's last line of defense on campus. They're doing amphetamines. Remember when "being up for the game" was kind of a spiritual thing? Now, man..."You up for the game?" "(pop, pop) Been up all week, man!""

- George Carlin

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"I used to be Irish Catholic; Now I'm an American. You know, you grow."

- George Carlin

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"O Beautiful, for smoggy skies, insecticided grain"

- George Carlin

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"There are four hundred thousand words in the English language, and there are seven you can't say on television. What a ratio that is: 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad; they'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large! "All of you over here, you seven? BAD WORDS." That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word!" ...No bad words; bad thoughts, bad intentions... and words. You know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."

- George Carlin

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"There are two-way words, like, it's okay for Curt Gowdy to say, "Roberto Clemente has two balls on him!" But he can't say, "I think he hurt his balls on that play, Tony, don't you?""

- George Carlin

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"And the other two-way word is "prick". It's okay if it happens to your finger; yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick!"

- George Carlin

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"Nobody goes right to work. You might get there on time, but, screw the company, those first twenty minutes belong to you, right? It's not an attitude in line with the American Spirit, but there it is: we all screw around first. "I just got here, man, you kiddin' me?" Really. You never see a memo that says 9:01."

- George Carlin

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"If you take five white guys and put 'em with five black guys, and let 'em hang around together for about a month, and at the end of the month, you'll notice that the white guys are walking and talking and standing like the black guys do. You'll never see the black guys going, "Oh, golly! We won the big game today, yes sir!" But you'll see guys with red hair named Duffy going, "What's happenin'?""

- George Carlin

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"It was in 1951, when I was 14, when grass swept the neighborhood. We hadn't been into grass before, we were into gang fighting, and wine and beer in the park, and punching the shit out of people, and having jackets with your name, and your girls were your 'debs', and you had turf, and all that dumb shit, and we would get into fights over girls...and then pot came along and gang fighting went away. In one semester, in shop class, all the guys went from making zip guns to hash pipes."

- George Carlin

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"Spoiler: advertising man says, "It's Good!""

- George Carlin

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"The seven dwarfs were each on different little trips. Happy was into grass and grass alone … Happy, that's all he did. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy, too much speed. Sneezy was a full blown coke freak. Doc was a connection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for Dopey. He's always got his arm out and his leg up. And then, the one we always forget, because he was Bashful. Bashful didn't use drugs. He was paranoid on his own. Didn't need any help on that ladder."

- George Carlin

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"Hansel and Gretel discovered the ginger bread house about 45 minutes after they discovered the mushrooms."

- George Carlin

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"I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood. Especially if it's me!"

- George Carlin

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"Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you."

- George Carlin

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"Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place, man? There's such balance in nature."

- George Carlin

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""Fussy eater" is a euphemism for "big pain in the ass"."

- George Carlin

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"And, of course, the funniest food: "kumquats". I don't even bring them home anymore. I sit there laughing and they go to waste."

- George Carlin

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"So I say live and let live. That's my motto. Live and let live. Anyone who can't go along with that, take him outside and shoot the motherfucker. It's a simple philosophy, but it's always worked in our family."

- George Carlin

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"Reminds me of something my grandfather would say. He'd say, "I'm goin' upstairs and fuck your grandmother." Well he was an honest guy ya know, he wasn't gonna bullshit a 4-year-old."

- George Carlin

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"Help me find some shoes I really like. Help me also to find a nymphomaniac coke connection who owns a Ferrari dealership."

- George Carlin

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"Let me arrive safely back at my hotel room. Don't let me be attacked by a maniac wearing a french tickler and a space helmet. Don't let my beard become entangled in the gears of a transcontinental bus. And don't let me be hit by a flying turd."

- George Carlin

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"Let's go for a drive OK? Well I'll go for a drive, you'll go for a ride. The person who drives the car they go for a drive, the other people they go for a ride. People don't know that, tell them when they're in your car. Say "you assholes are goin' for a ride!""

- George Carlin

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"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

- George Carlin

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"Have you noticed that there are some people, who when they lose something, their first reaction is that it had to be stolen? First thing- "Hey! It was stolen!" It's an ego defense. They can't stand the fact that they might have been stupid enough to have lost something. And even if it's something that anyone would really want that much. "Hey! Who stole my collection of used bandages?! And they also got away with my nude pictures of Ernest Borgnine!""

- George Carlin

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"There are battered husbands. Apparently this happens when the woman is real big, the man is very small, and they each drink a quart of whiskey a day."

- George Carlin

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"I never fucked a 10, but one night I fucked 5 twos!"

- George Carlin

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"And you know, I always wanted to work in a delicatessen just so that a woman would come in one day and ask me to give her some tongue. And I'd say "Well, I don't get off 'till four o'clock." And she'd say "Well, I don't get off at all. That's why I'm looking for some tongue!""

- George Carlin

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"You know how you speed up baseball? Everybody gets one swing. That's it, one swing, fuck you, you're out, sit down!"

- George Carlin

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"And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!"

- George Carlin

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"I really haven't seen this many people in one place since they took the group photographs of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan Administration. Two-hundred and twenty-five of 'em, so far! 225 different people in the Ronald Reagan administration have either quit, been fired, arrested, indicted or convicted of either breaking the law or violating the ethics code! These are the same people who were elected with the help of the moral majority. Elected with the help of the moral majority and the Teamsters union. That's a good combination! Organized religion and organized crime working together to help build a better America."

- George Carlin

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"I'm the first one to say it's a great country, but it's a strange culture. We got a strange culture. This has got to be the only country in the world that could ever come up with a disease like bulimia; gotta be the only country in the world where some people have no food at all, and other people eat a nourishing meal and puke it up intentionally. This is a country where tobacco kills four hundred thousand people a year, so they ban artificial sweeteners! Because a rat died! You know what I mean? This is a place where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards, but not a list of criminals and maniacs! And now, they're thinking about banning toy guns – and they're gonna keep the fucking real ones!"

- George Carlin

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"Next time you're at a wishing well. Doesn't happen often. Next time you're at a wishing well ask to see the manager! Tell him you've been coming there for 10 years and none of your wishes have come true. Either you gimme my money back—or I'm shittin' in the well!"

- George Carlin

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"It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do somethin' different. And of course this country is founded on the double standard, that's our history! We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free! So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out of the rest of the red Indian people, so they move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? "You give us a color, we'll wipe it out!""

- George Carlin

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"So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one — civil war. D'you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me...*machinegun sounds*...I'm awfully sorry! Awfully sorry." Now of course the Civil War has been over for about 120 years. But...not so you'd really notice it. Because you see we have these people called "Civil War buffs"...in fact some of these people actually get dressed up once a year and then go out and re-fight these battles. D'you know what I say to these people? USE LIVE AMMUNITION ASSHOLES, WOULD YA PLEASE?! You might just raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool!"

- George Carlin

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"These people call themselves "right to lifers." Don't you love that phrase? And don't you love the way these kind of people pervert the English language? You realize that most of the right-to-lifers are in favor of the DEATH penalty? And they support the South American DEATH squads. And they're against gun control and they're against nuclear weapons control. When they say "right to life," they're talking about THEIR right to decide which people should live or die. Doesn't it strike you as mildly ironic that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?"

- George Carlin

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"Some people try to get out of jury duty by lying. You don't have to lie. Tell the judge the truth. Tell him you'd make a terrific juror because you can spot guilty people [snaps fingers] just like that!"

- George Carlin

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"The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, decided all by itself that radio and television were the only two parts of American life not protected by the free speech provisions of the first amendment to the Constitution. I'd like to repeat that, because it sounds... *vaguely* important! The FCC, an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the president, decided on its own that radio and television were the only two parts of American life not protected by the first amendment to the Constitution. Why did they decide that? Because they got a letter from a minister in Mississippi! A Reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he didn't like. Well, Reverend, did anyone ever tell you there are two KNOBS on the radio? Two. Knobs. On the radio. Of course, I'm sure the reverend isn't that comfortable with anything that has two knobs on it. But hey, reverend, there are two knobs on the radio! One of them turns the radio OFF, and the other one [slaps his head] CHANGES THE STATION! Imagine that, reverend, you can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded upon. Look it up in the library, reverend, if you have any of them left when you've finished burning all the books."

- George Carlin

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"People I can do without. This is my list: guys in their fifties named "Skip." Anyone who pays for vaginal jelly with an Exxon credit card. An airline pilot who has on two different shoes. A proctologist with poor depth perception. A pimp who drives a Toyota Corolla. A gynecologist who wants my wife to have three or four drinks before the examination. Guys with a lot of small pins on their hats. Anyone who mentions Jesus more than three hundred times in a two-minute conversation. A dentist with blood in his hair. Any woman whose hobby is breast-feeding zoo animals. A funeral director who says "Hope to see you folks again real soon!" Girls who get drunk and throw up at breakfast. A man with only one lip. A Boy Scout master who owns a dildo shop. People who actually know the second verse to "The Star-Spangled Banner." Any lawyer who refers to the police as the "Federalies." A cross-eyed nun with a bullwhip and a bottle of gin! A brain surgeon with "Born to Lose" tattooed on his hands. Couples whose children's names all start with the same initials. A man in a hospital gown directing traffic. A waitress with a visible infection on her serving hand. People who have large gums and small teeth. Guys who wear the same underwear until it begins to cut off the circulation to their feet. And any man whose arm hair completely covers his wristwatch. All right, that's enough of that."

- George Carlin

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"I know that. Some people don't want you to mention certain things. Some people don't want you to say this, some people don't want you to say that. Some people think if you mention some things they might happen. Some people are really fucking stupid. Did you ever notice that, how many stupid people you run into during the day? Goddamn there's a lot of stupid bastards walking around. Carry a pad and pencil with you, you'll wind up with thirty or forty names by the end of the day. Think about this: think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that."

- George Carlin

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"Let me get a sip of water here...you figure this stuff is safe to drink? [audience yells "No"] Actually, I don't care, I drink it anyway. You know why? 'Cause I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I let government and industry poison me a little bit every day."

- George Carlin

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"But what's the alternative? What's the alternative to pumping out a unit every nine months? Pointless careerism? Pointless careerism, putting on a man tailored suit and shoulder pads and imitating all the worst behavior of men? Is this the noblest thing that women can think of?"

- George Carlin

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"But, when it comes to changing the language, I think they [feminists] make some good points, because we do think in language, and so the quality of our thoughts and ideas could only be as good as the quality of our language. So maybe some of this patriarchal shit ought to go away. I think "spokesman" ought to be "spokesperson," I think "chairman" ought to be "chairperson," I think "mankind" ought to be "humankind." But they take it too far, they take themselves too seriously, they exaggerate. They want me to call that thing in the street a "person-hole cover;" I think that's taking it a little bit too far. What would you call a lady's man, a "person's person"? That would make a "He-man" an "It-person." Little kids would be afraid of "the boogieperson". They'd look up in the sky and see "the person in the moon". Guys would say, "Come back here and fight like a person," And we'd all sing "For it's a jolly good person." That's the kind of thing you would hear on Late Night with David Letter-Person."

- George Carlin

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"Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a...secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in."

- George Carlin

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"Same with religion. Religion is nothing but mind control. Religion is just trying to control your mind, control your thoughts, so they're gonna tell you some things you shouldn't say because they're...sins. And besides telling you things you shouldn't say, religion is gonna suggest some things that you ought to be saying; "Here's something you ought to say first thing when you wake up in the morning; here's something you ought to say just before you go to sleep at night; here's something we always say on the third Wednesday in April after the first full moon in spring at 4 o'clock when the bells ring." Religion is always suggesting things you ought to be saying."

- George Carlin

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"Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that. The CIA doesn't kill anybody anymore, they neutralize people, or they depopulate the area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation. The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call sunshine units. Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists. Contra killers are called freedom fighters. Well, if crime fighters fight crime, and firefighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?"

- George Carlin

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"I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me. [...] I look at war a little bit differently. To me, war is a lot of prick-waving! OK? Simple thing. That's all it is. War is a whole lot of men standing out on a field waving their pricks at one another. Men are insecure about the size of their dicks, and so they have to kill one another over the idea. That's what all that asshole jock bullshit is all about. That's what all that adolescent, macho, male posturing and strutting in bars and locker rooms is all about. It's called "dick fear!" Men are terrified that their pricks are inadequate and so they have to compete with one another, to feel better about themselves, and since war is the ultimate competition, basically, men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem! You don't have to be a history major or a political scientist to see the bigger-dick foreign policy theory. It sounds like this: "What, they have bigger dicks? Bomb them!" And of course, the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It's a subconscious need to project the penis into other people's affairs. It's called "fucking with people!""

- George Carlin

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"Now, to balance the scale, I'd like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences. 'Cause that's all you ever hear about in this country. It's our differences. That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about—the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money! Fairly simple thing. Happens to work. You know? Anything different—that's what they're gonna talk about—race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank! You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs."

- George Carlin

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"That's another complaint of mine – too much use of this prefix "pre". It's all over the language now — "pre"-this, "pre"-that, place the turkey in a "pre-heated" oven. It's ridiculous! There are only two states an oven can possibly exist in: Heated or unheated! "Pre-heated" is a meaningless fucking term! It's like "pre-recorded" — "This program was pre-recorded." Well, of course it was pre-recorded! When else are you gonna record it, afterwards? That's the whole purpose of recording; to do it beforehand! Otherwise it doesn't really work, does it? "Pre-existing", "pre-planning", "pre-screening" — you know what I tell these people? "Pre-suck my genital situation!" And they seem to understand what I'm talking about."

- George Carlin

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"Think of the intellect it must take to derive pleasure from this activity: Hitting a ball with a crooked stick...and walking after it! And then...hitting it again! I say, "Pick it up, asshole, you're lucky you found the fuckin' thing! Put it in your pocket and go the fuck home, you're a winner! You're a winner!" But no, Dorko in the plaid knickers is gonna hit it again, and walk some more."

- George Carlin

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"There are over seventeen thousand golf courses in America. They average over one hundred and fifty acres a piece – that's three million plus acres, four thousand, eight hundred and twenty square miles – you could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware for the homeless on the land currently being wasted on this meaningless, mindless, arrogant, elitist, racist—there's another thing; the only blacks you'll find at country clubs are carrying trays—and a boring game. A boring game for boring people. You ever watch golf on television? It's like watching flies fuck! And a mindless game, too."

- George Carlin

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"We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: "save the planet." What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We don't care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract, they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are! We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" "Plastic... asshole.""

- George Carlin

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"Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't wanna fuck in the first place? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked. Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach military age. Then they think you're just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life... pro-life... These people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women. They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state."

- George Carlin

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"Here's another question I have. How come when it's us, it's an abortion, and when it's a chicken, it's an omelet? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen; that we passed chickens in goodness? Name six ways we're better than chickens... See, nobody can do it! You know why? 'Cause chickens are decent people. You don't see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No. You don't see a chicken strapping some guy to a chair and hooking up his nuts to a car battery, do you? When's the last chicken you heard about came home from work and beat the shit out of his hen, huh? Doesn't happen... 'cause chickens are decent people."

- George Carlin

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"See, the really hardcore people will tell you life begins at fertilization. Fertilization: When the sperm fertilizes the egg, which is usually a few moments after the man says, "Gee, honey, I was gonna pull out, but the phone rang and it startled me." Fertilization. But even after the egg is fertilized, it's still six or seven days before it reaches the uterus and pregnancy begins, and not every egg makes it that far. 80% of a woman's fertilized eggs are rinsed and flushed out of her body once a month during those delightful few days she has. They wind up on sanitary napkins, and yet they are fertilized eggs. So, basically, what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who has had more than one period is a serial killer!"

- George Carlin

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"Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ's sake! Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion and the Catholics and the Christians are just tossing them aside. You'd think they'd make natural allies! Don't look for consistency in religion."

- George Carlin

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"Life is sacred"? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death! Has been for thousands of years! Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians; all taking turns killing each other because God told 'em it was a good idea. The sword of god, the blood of the lamb, 'vengeance is mine'; millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers, all because they gave the wrong answer to The God Question: "Do you believe in God?" "No." BAM! Dead. "Do you believe in God?" "Yes." "...Do you believe in my God?" "No." BAM! Dead. "My God has a bigger dick than your God!"

- George Carlin

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"And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn't seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says 'Save the tumors'. Or 'I brake for advanced melanoma'. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up!"

- George Carlin

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"I distinguish between maniacs and crazy people; a maniac will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo, but he'll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time."

- George Carlin

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"I'm also tired of hearing about 'innocent victims'. This is an outmoded idea. There are no innocent victims. If you live on this planet, you're guilty, period, fuck you, end of report, next case. Next fucking case! Your birth certificate is proof of guilt!"

- George Carlin

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"And what can we do to silence these Christian athletes who thank Jesus whenever they win, never mention his name when they lose? Not a word. You never hear them say "Jesus made me drop the ball." "The good Lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage." According to these guys, Jesus is undefeated, meanwhile these assholes are in last place. Must be another one of those "miracles.""

- George Carlin

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"And camcorders: here is technology gone berserk. Everywhere you go now, there's some dick, some yo-yo, some putz with a camcorder, and he is going to tape...EVERYTHING! Doesn't anyone in this country stop and LOOK AT THINGS anymore? Sort of take them in? Maybe even...remember them? Is that such a strange notion. Does experience need to be documented and brought home and saved on a shelf? And do people really watch this shit? Are people's lives so bankrupt they sit at home looking at things they already DID?"

- George Carlin

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"A lot of these cultural crimes I've been complaining about can be blamed on the Baby Boomers, something else I'm getting tired of hearing about...whiny, narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: "GIMME IT, IT'S MINE!" "GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE!" These people were given everything. Everything was handed to them. And they took it all: sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and they stayed loaded for 20 years and had a free ride. But now they're staring down the barrel of middle-age burnout, and they don't like it. So they've turned self-righteous. They want to make things harder on younger people. They tell 'em, abstain from sex, say no to drugs; as for the rock and roll, they sold that for television commercials a long time ago...so they could buy pasta machines and stairmasters and soybean futures! They're cold, bloodless people. It's in their slogans, it's in their rhetoric: "No pain, no gain." "Just do it." "Life is short, play hard." "Shit happens, Deal with it." "Get a life." These people went from 'do your own thing' to 'just say No'. They went from 'love is all you need' to 'whoever winds up with the most toys wins'. And they went from cocaine to Rogaine. And you know something, they're still counting grams, only now it's fat grams. And the worst of it is, the rest of us have to watch these commercials on TV for Levi's loose-fitting jeans and fat-ass Docker pants, because these degenerate yuppie Boomer cocksuckers couldn't keep their hands off the croissants and the Häagen-Dazs, and their big fat asses have spread all over and they have to wear fat-ass Docker pants. Fuck these Boomers, fuck these yuppies—and fuck everybody, now that I think of it. [beat] Sometimes, in comedy, you have to generalize."

- George Carlin

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"So let me ask you something: how's everybody doing tonight, huh? (audience cheers) Good, well, fuck you! Just trying to make you feel at home."

- George Carlin

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"Living in this country, you're bound to know, every time you're exposed to advertising, you realize once again that America's leading industry, America's most profitable business is still: the manufacture, packaging, distribution and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure, American bullshit. And the sad part is, is that most people seem to have been indoctrinated to believe that bullshit only comes from certain places, certain sources: advertising, politics, salesmen – not true. Bullshit is everywhere. Bullshit is rampant. Parents are full of shit, teachers are full of shit, clergymen are full of shit, and law enforcement people are full...of...shit – this entire country. This entire country is completely full of shit, and always has been. From the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution to the Star-Spangled Banner, it's still nothing more than one big steaming pile of red, white and blue, all-American bullshit. Because, think of how we started. Think of that. This country was founded by a group of slave-owners who told us all men are created equal. Oh yeah, all men, except for Indians and niggers and women, right? I always like to use that authentic American language. This was a small group of unelected, white, male, land-holding, slave-owners who also suggested their class be the only one allowed to vote. Now, that is what's known as being stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit. And I think Americans really show their ignorance when they say they want their politicians to be honest. What are these fuckin' cretins talking about? If honesty were suddenly introduced into American life, the whole system would collapse! No one would know what to do! Honesty would FUCK THIS COUNTRY UP!!"

- George Carlin

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"The American people like their bullshit right out front where they can get a good, strong whiff of it. Clinton might be full of shit, but at least he lets you know it. Dole tried to hide it, didn't he? Dole kept saying, "I'm a plain and honest man." Bullshit! People don't believe that! What did Clinton say? He said, "Hi folks, I'm completely full of shit, and how do you like that?" And the people said, "You know something? At least he's honest." At least he's honest about being completely full of shit."

- George Carlin

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"Everybody knows by now, all businessmen are completely full of shit; just the worst kind of low-life, criminal, cocksuckers you could ever wanna' run into – a fuckin' piece of shit businessman. And the proof of it, the proof of it is, they don't even trust each other. They don't trust one another. When a business man sits down to negotiate a deal, the first thing he does is to automatically assume that the other guy is a complete lying prick who's trying to fuck him outta his money. So he's gotta do everything he can to fuck the other guy a little bit faster and a little bit harder. And he's gotta do it with a big smile on his face. You know that big, bullshit businessman smile? And if you're a customer – Whoah! – that's when you get the really big smile. Customer always gets that really big smile, as the businessman carefully positions himself directly behind the customer, and unzips his pants, and proceeds to service...the...account. I am servicing this account. This customer needs service. Now you know what they mean. Now you know what they mean when they say, "We specialize in customer service." Whoever coined the phrase "let the buyer beware" was probably bleeding from the asshole. That's business."

- George Carlin

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"And here… as long as we’re talking about theme restaurants, I got a proposition for you. I think if white people are gonna burn down black churches, then black people ought to burn down the House of Blues! Huh? What a fucking disgrace that place is! The House of Blues… they ought to call it the House of Lame White Motherfuckers; inauthentic, low frequency, single-digit, lame, white motherfuckers… especially these male movie stars who think they’re blues artists. You ever see these guys? Don’t you just wanna puke in your soup when one of these fat, balding, overweight, overaged, out of shape, middle aged, male movie stars with sunglasses jumps onstage and starts blowing into a harmonica? It’s a fucking sacrilege! In the first place, white people got no business playing the blues ever at all under any circumstances ever, ever, ever! What the fuck do white people have to be blue about? Banana Republic ran out of khakis? Huh? The espresso machine is jammed? Hootie and the Blowfish are breaking up? Shit, white people ought to understand their job is to give people the blues, not to get them… and certainly not to sing or play them. Tell you a little secret about the blues; it’s not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played, and another thing… I don’t think white people should be trying to dance like blacks. Stop that! Stick to your faggoty polkas and waltzes and that repulsive country line-dancing shit that you do and be yourself, be proud, be white, be lame, and get the fuck off the dance floor!"

- George Carlin

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"In the bullshit department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I got to tell you the truth, folks: when it comes to bullshit - big-time, major-league bullshit - you have to stand in awe, in AWE of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest! Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it: religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time... But He loves you! He loves you, and He needs MONEY! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise - somehow, just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story... Holy Shit!"

- George Carlin

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"I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on. And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshiper. Well, not overnight, you can't see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshiper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know?..."

- George Carlin

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"Pray for anything you want. Pray for anything, but what about the Divine Plan? Remember that? The Divine Plan. Long time ago, God made a Divine Plan. Gave it a lot of thought, decided it was a good plan, put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years, the Divine Plan has been doing just fine. Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn't in God's Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a Divine Plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up Your Plan? And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing."

- George Carlin

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"It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths! In prisons, before they give you a lethal injection, they swab your arm with alcohol! It's true! It's true. It's true! Well, they don't want you to get an infection! And you can see their point: wouldn't want some guy to go to Hell and be sick! It would take all the sportsmanship out of the whole execution. Fear of germs? Why, these bunch of goddamn pussies! You can't even get a decent hamburger anymore. They cook the shit out of everything now, 'cause everybody's afraid of food poisoning! Hey, where's your sense of adventure? Take a fucking chance, will ya? You know how many people die in this country from food poisoning every year? Nine thousand! That's all - it's a minor risk! Take a fucking chance, bunch of goddamn pussies! Besides, what do you think you have an immune system for? It's for killing germs! But it needs practice. It needs germs to practice on. So listen, if you kill all the germs around you and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you're not gonna be prepared. And never mind ordinary germs. What are you gonna do when some supervirus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit? I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna get sick, you're gonna die, and you're gonna deserve it 'cause you're fucking weak and you've got a fucking weak immune system!"

- George Carlin

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"Quality, value, style, service, selection, convenience, economy, savings, performance, experience, hospitality, low rates, friendly service, name brands, easy terms, affordable prices, money-back guarantee, free installation, free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free home trial, and free parking. No cash? No problem. No kidding. No muss, no fuss, no risk, no obligation, no red tape, no down payment, no entry fee, no hidden charges, no purchase necessary, no one will call on you, no payments of interest 'til September. But limited time only, though, so act now, order today, send no money. Offer good while supplies last. Two to a customer, each item sold separately, batteries not included, mileage may vary, all sales are final, allow six weeks for delivery. Some items not available, some assembly required, some restrictions may apply. So come on in. Come on in for a free demonstration and a free consultation with our friendly professional staff. Our experienced and knowledgeable sales representatives will help you make a selection that's just right for you and just right for your budget. And say, don't forget to pick up your free gift, a classic, deluxe, custom, designer, luxury, prestige, high quality, premium select, gourmet pocket pencil sharpener. Yours for the asking, no purchase necessary, it's our way of saying thank you. And if you act now, we'll include an extra added, free, complimentary bonus gift, a classic, deluxe, custom, designer, luxury, prestige, high quality, premium select, gourmet combination key ring, magnifying glass and garden hose in a genuine imitation leather style carrying case with authentic vinyl trim. Yours for the asking, no purchase necessary, it's our way of saying thank you. Actually, it's our way of saying, "Bend over just a little bit farther, so we can stick this big advertising dick up your ass a little bit deeper!""

- George Carlin

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"[in response to someone in the audience yelling something] Would somebody just put a dick in that guy's mouth, please? 'Cause that's what he wants. He's a cocksucker in disguise. He's got his mouth open 'cause he wants someone to cum in it. Now, do you wanna keep making noise, motherfucker, and we can find you that way, or are you just a punk coward asshole bullshit loud motherfucker and you're gonna shut up now so we don't find out where the fuck you're sitting? 'Cause if you keep it up, we'll grab your ass and throw you on the fucking street, where you belong, with your mother! And I'm fucking her in the asshole every night anyway, so fuck you and your sister and your wife! If you got a kid, I hope your fucking kid dies in a car fire! How do you like that, you stupid cocksucker? Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of here! … You know? See … You gotta use psychology. You gotta be a bit of a psychologist up here and know how to appeal to a person."

- George Carlin

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"Here's some bumper stickers I'd like to see:"

- George Carlin

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"If my car should be in such a position where I can't quite see what's going on, can't get a good enough look, I'm not the least bit shy about asking the police to bring the bodies over a little closer to the car. "Pardon me, officer, would you mind dragging that twisted-looking chap over here a little closer to the car, please? My wife has never seen anyone shaped quite like that. Look at that, Sugar Lips! That's his ribcage sticking out the glove compartment. Thank you, officer, that'll be all. You can throw him back on the pile.""

- George Carlin

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"Here's my problem with the Ten Commandments: why are there ten? Why are there ten? You don't need ten. I believe the list of ten commandments was artificially and deliberately inflated to get it up to ten. Here's what happened: About 5,000 years ago, a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to try to figure out how to control people, how to keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so they announced that God had given them some commandments, up on a mountain, when no one was around... God had given them the Ten Commandments. Well, let me ask you this- when they were making this shit up, why did they pick ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I'll tell you why- because ten sounds official. Ten sounds important! Ten is the basis for the decimal system, it's a decade, it's a psychologically satisfying number, the top ten, the ten most wanted, the ten best dressed. So having ten commandments was really a marketing decision. And it's clearly a bullshit list. It's a political document, artificially inflated to sell better."

- George Carlin

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"I give you my revised list of the Two Commandments: "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie", and "thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than the one you pray to". Two is all you need; Moses could have carried them down the hill in his fuckin' pocket, and I wouldn't mind those folks in Alabama posting them on the courthouse wall, as long as they provided one additional commandment: "Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself"."

- George Carlin

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"I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect."

- George Carlin

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"Everything's been sanitized now and cleaned up. First with these fucking Christians. You just start with them. You know. I'm so, you know. That's just one, wait a minute now. Yeah, you know. Let's not leave out these PC campus liberal assholes. I mean they're just as fucking bad from a different direction."

- George Carlin

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"You know the best thing about necrophilia? You don't have to bring flowers. Yeah, usually they're already there. Isn't that nice? It's nice. It's convenient."

- George Carlin

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"People are fucking nuts. This country is full of nitwits and assholes. You ever notice that? Oh, my goodness. Nitwits, assholes, fuckups, scumbags, jerkoffs, and dipshits. And they all vote. They all vote. In fact, sometimes you get the impression that they're the only ones who vote."

- George Carlin

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"People are fucking dumb. You can say what you want about this country, and I love this place. I love the freedoms we used to have. I love that. I love it when it didn't take a fucking catastrophe to get us to care for one another. I love the fact that we're on camera all the time from all angles. But you know what, you can say what you want about America, and I say I love this place. I wouldn't have it any other way, wouldn't have it at any other time in history, wouldn't have it in any other place. But- say what you want about America, land of the free, home of the brave, we got some dumbass motherfuckers floating around in this country. Dumbass motherfuckers, you know."

- George Carlin

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"Americans love to eat. They are fatally attracted to the slow death of fast food... This country is big-time pig time... Change the bald eagle to a big bowl of macaroni and cheese. A big bowl. 'Cause everything in this country is king size, extra-large and super jumbo. Especially the fucking people! Have you seen some of the people in this country? Have you taken a good look at some of these big, fat motherfuckers walking around? Big fat motherfuckers! Oh, my God. Huge piles of redundant protoplasm, lumbering through the malls like a fleet of interstate buses. The people in this country are immense. Massive bellies, monstrous thighs, and big fat fucking asses! Next time you're in the vicinity of one of these creatures, stand there for a minute and observe. And if you stand there for a minute you'll begin to wonder, "How does this woman take a shit?" How does she shit? And more frightening still, how does she wipe her ass? Can she even locate her asshole? She must require assistance. Are paramedics trained in this field?"

- George Carlin

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"There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right."

- George Carlin

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"They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. ...The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. ...And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it."

- George Carlin

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"I'd like to begin by saying fuck Lance Armstrong. Fuck him and his balls, and his bicycles, and his steroids, and his yellow shirts, and the dumb empty expression on his face. I'm tired of that asshole."

- George Carlin

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"One great thing about getting old is that you can get out of all sorts of social obligations just by saying you're tired."

- George Carlin

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"This conversation is bound to turn up. Two guys in a street meet each other, and one of them says, "Hey, did you hear? Phil Davis died." "Phil Davis? I just saw him yesterday." "Yeah? … Didn't help. He died anyway. Apparently, the simple act of you seeing him did not slow his cancer down. In fact, it may have made it more aggressive. You know, you could be the cause for Phil's death. How do you live with yourself?""

- George Carlin

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"I call him Governor Bush because that's the only political office he's ever held legally in this country. I don't care where they hang his portrait, I don't care how big his library is. To me, he'll always be "Governor bush." I don't even capitalize his name when I type it anymore."

- George Carlin

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"Where would we be without our safe, familiar, American bullshit? "Land of the Free," "Home of the Brave," "The American Dream," "All men are equal," "Justice is blind," "The Press is free," "Your vote counts," "Business is honest," "The good guys win," "The police are on your side," "God is watching you," "Your standard of living will never decline" and "Everything is going to be just fine:" the official national bullshit story. I call it the American Okie Doke. Every one, every one of those items is provably untrue at one level or another, but we believe them because they're pounded into our heads from the time we're children. That's what they do with that kind of thing—pound it into the heads of kids, 'cause they know the children are much too young to be able to muster an intellectual defense against a sophisticated idea like that, and they know that, up to a certain age, children believe everything their parents tell them. And as a result, they never learn to question things. Nobody questions things in this country anymore."

- George Carlin

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"But let's say it's true; let's say God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has ten stipulations, okay? Ten rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week because we've had to amend the Bill of Rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things. Like...SLAVERY! Just fuckin' slipped his mind."

- George Carlin

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"Now, if you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. Next time you are at the computer, get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in "Japanese Americans 1942", and you will find out all about your precious fucking rights, okay? In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That is all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had: "Right this way!"—into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away. And rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year, the list gets shorter and shorter. You see all, sooner or later. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them! The government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply does not give a fuck about you! It's interested in its own power. That's the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible."

- George Carlin

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"I'm gettin' tired of guys who smoke pipes. When are they gonna outlaw this shit? Guy with a fuckin' pipe! It's an arrogant thing to place a burning barrier between you and the rest of the world. It's supposed to imply thoughtfulness or intelligence. It's not intelligent to stand around with a controlled fire sticking out of your mouth. I say, "Hey, professor! You want somethin' hot to suck on? Call me! I'll give ya somethin' to put in your mouth!" I think these pipe-smokers oughta just move to the next level and go ahead and suck a dick. There's nothing wrong with suckin' dicks. Men do it, women do it; can't be all bad if everybody's doin' it. I say, Drop the pipe, and go to the dick! That's my advice. I'm here to help."

- George Carlin

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"I've also grown weary of reading about clouds in a book. Doesn't this piss you off? You're reading a nice story, and suddenly the writer has to stop and describe the clouds. Who cares? [...] I'm not interested. Skip the clouds and get to the fucking. The only story I know of where clouds are important was Noah's Ark! (12)"

- George Carlin

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"We're not satisfied with forcing Russia to destroy its nuclear weapons and recant its ideology. Now we're really going to get even: we're sending experts to show them how to run their economy. Am I missing something? A country with a five-trillion-dollar debt is giving advice on handling money? (101)"

- George Carlin

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"Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony. If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein's army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large. Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic. (154)"

- George Carlin

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"Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit. (206)"

- George Carlin

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"There is something refreshingly ironic about people lying on the beach contracting skin cancer in an attempt to acquire a purely illusory appearance of good health, while germ-laden medical waste washes up on the sand all around them. (entitled Surf's Down Forever, p. 207)"

- George Carlin

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"Nature used to eliminate the weak, imperfect kids before they were old enough to reproduce their flaws. Now we have a medical industry dedicated to keeping people alive just long enough to pass along their bad genes to another generation. It's medical arrogance, and it works against nature's plan. (224)"

- George Carlin

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"I'm sick of hearing about a baby being kept alive on a resuscitator while doctors wait for a kidney to be flown in on a private jet contributed by some corporation seeking good publicity because they just killed six thousand people in Pakistan with a chemical spill. I'm tired of this shit being presented in the context of real news. (224)"

- George Carlin

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"Many people work on war plans; not too many work on peace plans. They even have a war college at Ft. McNair, Washington. They call it the National Defense University, but it's a war college. They don't have a peace college. And they have war plans for every contingency, no matter how remote. If Easter Island gives us some crap tomorrow, we have a plan in a computer that tells us exactly how to thoroughly bomb the shit out of Easter Island. You name the country, we've got the plan. (p. 237)"

- George Carlin

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"Don Ho can sign autographs 3.4 times faster than Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. (243)"

- George Carlin

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""One thing leads to another"? Not always. Sometimes one thing leads to the same thing. Ask an addict."

- George Carlin

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"Try explaining Hitler to a kid."

- George Carlin

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"I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it."

- George Carlin

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"When it comes to God's existence, I'm not an atheist and I'm not an agnostic- I'm an acrostic, the whole thing puzzles me."

- George Carlin

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"I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed."

- George Carlin

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"I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work."

- George Carlin

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"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that."

- George Carlin

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"Meow means "woof" in cat."

- George Carlin

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"Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that shit."

- George Carlin

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"I do not torture animals, and I do not support the torture of animals, such as that which goes on at rodeos: cowardly men in big hats abusing simple beasts in a fruitless search for manhood. In fact, I regularly pray for serious, life-threatening rodeo injuries. I wish for a cowboy to walk crooked, and with great pain, for the rest of his life."

- George Carlin

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"I am perfectly willing to share the room with a fly, as long as he is patrolling that portion of the room I don't occupy. But if he starts that smart-ass fly shit, buzzing my head and repeatedly landing on my arm, he is engaging in high-risk behavior."

- George Carlin

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"I think I am, therefore I am. I think."

- George Carlin

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"An art thief is a man who takes pictures."

- George Carlin

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"If it requires a uniform, it's a worthless endeavor."

- George Carlin

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""Undisputed heavyweight champion." Well, if it's undisputed, what's all the fighting about?"

- George Carlin

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"I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal? You know, why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away? I can't follow the logic on that one at all! Of all the things you can do, giving someone an orgasm is hardly the worst thing in the world. In the army they give you a medal for spraying napalm on people! In civilian life you go to jail for giving someone an orgasm! Maybe I'm not supposed to understand it..."

- George Carlin

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"The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains."

- George Carlin

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"I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars."

- George Carlin

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"There's something I like about the clitoris, but I can't quite put my finger on it."

- George Carlin

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"If people stand in a circle long enough, they'll eventually begin to dance."

- George Carlin

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"One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is "libertarian". People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable and, to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy."

- George Carlin

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"You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out."

- George Carlin

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"So maybe it's not the politicians who suck; maybe it's something else. Like the public. That would be a nice realistic campaign slogan for somebody: "The public sucks. Elect me." Put the blame where it belongs: on the people. Because if everything is really the fault of politicians, where are all the bright, honest, intelligent Americans who are ready to step in and replace them? Where are these people hiding? The truth is, we don't have people like that. Everyone's at the mall, scratching his balls and buying sneakers with lights in them. And complaining about the politicians."

- George Carlin

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"For myself, I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way. On Election Day, I stay home. Two reasons: first of all, voting is meaningless; this country was bought and paid for a long time ago. That empty shit they shuffle around and repackage every four years doesn't mean a thing. Second, I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. I know some people like to twist that around and say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." But where's the logic in that? Think it through: If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and you screw things up, then you're responsible for what they've done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote—who, in fact, did not even leave the house on Election Day—am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess you created. Which I had nothing to do with. Why can't people see that?"

- George Carlin

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"People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point."

- George Carlin

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"I had no shoes, and I felt sorry for myself until I met a man who had no feet. I took his shoes. Now I feel better."

- George Carlin

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"They say rather than cursing the darkness, one should light a candle. They don't mention anything about cursing a lack of candles."

- George Carlin

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"Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid."

- George Carlin

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"Catholic kids are stupid; they don't know how to handle a pedophile priest. Here's what you do: First of all, you don't get all scared and do whatever he tells you. Who wants to get sucked off by a forty-three-year-old clergyman with beard stubble? Not me. Instead, what you do is kick him in the nuts. You kick him squarely in the nuts, and you get the fuck out of there as fast as you can, and you go tell somebody right away; you tell as many grown-up people as you can––one of them is bound to believe you. That's what you do. You don't wait thirty years. You kick the priest in the nuts and say, "Fuck you, Father, I don't do that shit"... And you're out the door."

- George Carlin

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"Regarding public Christmas displays: At some point, someone who worked at Rockefeller Center must have said, "Boys, I have a great idea for Christmas. Let's kill a beautiful tree that's been alive for seventy-five years and bring it to New York City. We'll stand it up in Rockefeller Plaza and conceal its natural beauty by hanging shiny, repulsive, man-made objects on it, and let it stand there slowly dying for several weeks while simpleminded children stare at it and people from Des Moines take pictures of it. That way, perhaps we can add our own special, obscene imprint to Christmas in Midtown.""

- George Carlin

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"I think we need some new Christmas carols with a more modern approach. Of course, I wouldn't abandon the religious theme completely. How about "Holy Christ, the Christmas Tree's on Fire"? Or "Jesus, Can You Believe It's Christmas Again?" This ought to get the ball rolling; I'm hoping you people will take it from here."

- George Carlin

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"I don't believe in road rage; I prefer the gentle rebuke. If I don't like the way someone is driving, I pull up alongside the other car and say, "I hope your children turn out poorly." Only once have I lost my cool. That was the time I said to a woman, "I hope you get a blister on your cunt.' But I said it with a smile."

- George Carlin

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"During bombing raids in Iraq, the media liked to say that Saddam Hussein used people as human shields. That's not accurate. Although it's true they were used as shields, the fact is they were humans already. So if these humans were used as shields, they were human shields. They weren't being used as human shields. Got that?"

- George Carlin

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"Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech. .. These allegedly well-intentioned people have strayed so far from reality that it will not be a surprise for me to someday hear a rape victim referred to as an unwilling sperm recipient. .. Political correctness cripples discourse, creates ugly language and is generally stupid."

- George Carlin

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"The fanatics have another name for fetuses. They call them the pre-born. Now we're getting creative. If you accept pre-born, I think you would have to say that, at the moment of birth, we go instantly from being pre-born to being pre-dead. Makes sense, doesn't it? Technically, we're all pre-dead."

- George Carlin

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"Dear Political Activists, All your chanting, marching, voting, picketing, boycotting and letter-writing will not change a thing; you will never right the wrongs of this world. The only thing your activity will accomplish is to make some of you feel better. Such activity makes powerless people feel useful, and provides them the illusion that they're making a difference. But it doesn't work. Nothing changes. The powerful keep the power. That's why they're called the powerful. This is similar to people's belief that love can overcome everything, that it has some special power. It doesn't. Except one on one. One on one, love is incredibly powerful. It is a beautiful thing. But if love had any power to change the world, it would have prevailed by now. Love can't change the world. It's nice. It's pleasant. It's better than hate. But it has no special power over things. It just feels good. Love yourself, find another person to love and feel good. Love, George"

- George Carlin

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"I, George Carlin, being of sound mind, do not wish, upon my demise, to be buried or cremated. I wish to be BLOWN UP."

- George Carlin

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"Floating around the Internet these days, posted and e-mailed back and forth, are a number of writings attributed to me, and I want people to know they're not mine. Don't blame me.Some are essay-length, some are just short lists of one and two-line jokes, but if they're flyin' around the Internet, they're probably not mine. Occasionally, a couple of jokes on a long list might have come from me, but not often. And because most of this stuff is really lame, it's embarrassing to see my name on it.And that's the problem. I want people to know that I take care with my writing, and try to keep my standards high. But most of this "humor" on the Internet is just plain stupid. I guess hard-core fans who follow my stuff closely would be able to spot the fake stuff, because the tone of voice is so different. But a casual fan has no way of knowing, and it bothers me that some people might believe I'd actually be capable of writing some of this stuff."

- George Carlin

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"I figured out years ago that the human species is totally fucked and has been for a long time. I also know that the sick, media-consumer culture in America continues to make this so-called problem worse. But the trick, folks, is not to give a fuck. Like me. I really don't care. I stopped worrying about all this temporal bullshit a long time ago. It's meaningless."

- George Carlin

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"After "Jammin' In New York", I went from a comedian who wrote his own material to a writer who performed his own material... I became socially conscious, and found I had something to say that wasn't too common."

- George Carlin

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"[Responding prematurely to the unfinished question, "Are you trying to change the world or are you trying to...?" and then to the followup query, as to whether Carlin's initial answer was "meant tongue-in-cheek."] [No, I'm] trying] to show how funny it all is. Philosophers have wondered for centuries: Why are we here? And I say, I'm here to see the show. So, let's get busy with these wars. I'm very disappointed in all these peace things that are going on. They're really letting me down. You take ancient hatreds and modern weapons and you got a nice recipe for some entertaining stuff. [...] I'm only being partly facetious. If you scratch any cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist."

- George Carlin

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"[On why he lacked faith in humanity] The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god – that there's a man in the sky with ten things he doesn't want you to do and you'll burn for a long time if you do them – and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That's the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on stage. I feel betrayed by the people I'm part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures."

- George Carlin

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"Comedy is filled with surprise, so when I cross a line... I like to find out where the line might be and then cross it deliberately, and then make the audience happy about crossing the line with me."

- George Carlin

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"[On the existence of God] No. No, there's no God, but there might be some sort of an organizing intelligence, and I think to understand it is way beyond our ability. It's certainly not a judgmental entity. It's certainly not paternalistic and all these qualities that have been attributed to God. It's probably a dispassionate... That's why I say, "Suppose He doesn't give a shit? Suppose there is a God but He just doesn't give a shit?" That's the kind of thing that might be at work."

- George Carlin

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"I feel that as long as I have sound ideas, a sound underpinning of argument and analysis, then there’s nothing I can’t or shouldn’t talk about. For instance, people say you can’t joke about rape. Rape’s not funny. I say, okay, imagine Porky Pig raping Bugs Bunny. That’s funny, isn’t it?"

- George Carlin

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"[On his work appearing on the Internet] It's a conflicted feeling. I'm really a populist, down in the very center of me. I like the power people can accrue for themselves, and I like the idea of user-generated content and taking power from the corporations. The other half of the conflict, though, is that, traditionally speaking, artists are protected from copyright infringement. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about solving this issue. It's someone else's job."

- George Carlin

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"For a while, I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It's a shame everything has to have a label. I feel that if I was figuratively dropped on the Earth and there was a political line, I would be just left of center. The difference for me is that conservatives are more interested in property values and rights and free markets, and liberals are more interested in human rights. In the end, there are people who don't fit into the marketplace and are not equipped. I believe the government should step in where the free market fails."

- George Carlin

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"I wonder why prostitution is illegal. Why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away?"

- George Carlin

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"I found a very liberating position for myself, as an artist… and that was: I sort ofgave up on the human race, I gave up on the American dream and culture and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome."

- George Carlin

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"When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts … Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend."

- George Carlin

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"The difference between left and right of center … originated in the French parliament. The people left of center were liberals; the people right of center were conservatives. Broadly speaking. And generally speaking, people on … the right of center, are interested in property values, property, property rights. The rights and the rights of property. And generally speaking again – it's all generalized – the left-of-center people are more concerned with humans and human beings and human concerns; to the care of humans, not the care and worry about property rights. That's generally been true. And Bush is pushing this country farther down the hill, faster than anyone has before."

- George Carlin

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"The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there are a handful insurance companies, there are six or seven information centers...but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors. Because you have the illusion of choice!"

- George Carlin

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"The planet is fine. The people are [bleeped out]. Because everyone is trying to save the planet. The planet doesn't need that. The planet will take care of itself. People are selfish. And that's what they're doing is trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live. They don't care about the planet in theory. They just care about having a comfortable place. And these people with the fires and the floods and everything, they overbuild, they put nature to the test and they get what's coming to them. That's what I say. That's what's happening, and I can't wait for the sea levels to rise. I can't wait for some of these cities to disappear. There are places that are going to go away. The map is going to change and that's because -- people think nature is outside of them. They don't take into them the idea that we are part of it. They say, "oh, we're going for a nature walk. We're going to the country because we like nature." Nature is in here. [points to chest] And if you're in tune with it, like the Indians, the Hopis, especially, the balance of life, the balance, the harmony of nature, if you understand that, you don't overbuild. You don't do all this moron stuff."

- George Carlin

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"We are on a nice downward glide. I call it circling the drain ... And the circles get smaller and smaller and faster and faster, if you watch the sink empty... Huish! And we'll be gone. And that's fine. I welcome it. I wish I could live 1000 years to watch it happen. From a distance — so I can see it all."

- George Carlin

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"I gave up on this stuff. I gave up on my species and ... I gave up on my countrymen. Because I think we squandered great gifts. I think humans were given great great gifts: walking upright, binocular vision, opposable thumb, large brain ... We grew. We had great gifts, and we gave it all up for both money and God ... We gave it all up to superstition, primitive superstition, primitive shit ... Invisible man in the sky, looking down, keeping track of what we do, make sure we don't do the wrong thing, if we do, he puts us in hell, where we burn forever. That kind of shit is very limiting for this brain we have. So we keep ourselves limited. And then we want a toy and a gizmo and gold and we want shiny things, and we want something to plug in that will make big big big things for us... And all that shit is nothing! It's nothing."

- George Carlin

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"You know what, I said it this way: when you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks. And I'm a notebook kind of guy: [pretends to be taking notes] "Oh, my God, did you see that? Did you see what he just did?..." And I watch the freak show, and I kept my notes, and I make up stuff about it, and I talk about the freaks. And the freaks are all humans, and they are all like me, and we are all the same. I'm not better, I'm not different, I'm just apart now. I'm separate, I'm over here, because I put myself out of the mix. I don't have a stake at the outcome. I'm not a cheerleader for a given outcome now."

- George Carlin

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"They say if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. And I would admit, that somewhere underneath all this there's a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would love to see it all — huish! — change. But it can't happen that way. And incremental change — it just seems the pile of shit is too deep."

- George Carlin

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"The Paradox of Our Time is one of many stories that has been forwarded around the internet and attributed to Carlin, but is actually by Bob Moorehead."

- George Carlin

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"I am a Bad American is another mass-forwarded internet message often attributed to George Carlin, but was not written by him."

- George Carlin

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"I want to live my next life backwards: You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day. Then you get kicked out for being too healthy. Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension. Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You get ready for High School: drink alcohol, party, and you're generally promiscuous. Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no responsibilities. Then you become a baby, and then... You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions – central heating, room service on tap, and then... You finish off as an orgasm."

- George Carlin

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"Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body"

- George Carlin

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"Various lists of humorous one-liners were forwarded through email in the 1990s, falsely attributed to George Carlin. Some of these one-liners included:"

- George Carlin

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"Carlin had a career as a stand-up comic that spanned a half-century, in which he continually broke new ground, targeting those in power with his wit and genius. He impacted our culture, our media and our nation with a stream of material that skewered institutions of the left and right, from government to business and the church...George Carlin pointed out what in our society was truly indecent: the behavior of the powerful. Yes, he spiced his delivery with expletives. He was angry. He, like Pacifica, gave voice to essential, dissident perspectives that have been almost entirely blocked from mainstream media."

- George Carlin

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"Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things."

- Andy Warhol

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"The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do."

- Andy Warhol

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"The farther West we drove [to California, Fall of 1963, with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead for an opening of Warhol's 'Liz & Elvis paintings' at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles], the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere – that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it – to us, it was the new Art. Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.. ..the mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting. [quote in 1963]"

- Andy Warhol

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"I think of myself as an American artist: I like it here.. .I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those things in my paintings because those things are the things I know best. I'm not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all. I'm just a pure artist, I guess. But I can't say if I take myself seriously as an artist. I just hadn't thought about it. I don't know how they consider me in print, though."

- Andy Warhol

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"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

- Andy Warhol

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"In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

- Andy Warhol

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":: In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes."

- Andy Warhol

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":: In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame"

- Andy Warhol

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":: In the future, fifteen people will be famous."

- Andy Warhol

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":: In fifteen minutes, everyone will be famous."

- Andy Warhol

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"Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory [...] Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries."

- Andy Warhol

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"Scripts bore me. It's much more exciting not to know what's going to happen. I don't think that plot is important. If you see a movie of two people talking, you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved – you miss things – you come back to it ... But you can't see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending ... Everyone is rich. Everyone is interesting. Years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street. Or on a park bench. They would stay for hours without being bored although nothing much was going on. This is my favorite theme in movie making – just watching something happening for two hours or so ... I still think it's nice to care about people. And Hollywood movies are uncaring. We're pop people. We took a tour of Universal Studios in Los Angeles and, inside and outside the place, it was very difficult to tell what was real. They're not-real people trying to say something. And we're real people not trying to say anything. I just like everybody and I believe in everything."

- Andy Warhol

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"It's hard to be creative and it's also hard not to think what you do is creative or hard not to be called creative because everybody is always talking about that and individuality. Everybody's always creative. And it is so funny when you say things aren't, like the shoe I would draw for an advertisement was called a 'creation', but the drawing of it was not.. .There are millions of actors. They're all pretty good. And how many painters are there? Millions of painters and all pretty good. How can you say one style is better then another. You ought to be able to be an Abstract-expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you're given up something."

- Andy Warhol

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"If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now [1963]. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that's going to be the whole new scene."

- Andy Warhol

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"We went to see Dr No [first James Bond film, 1962] at Fort-Second Street. It's a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood. I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them - it's just part of the scene - and hurting people. My show in Paris is to be called Death in America. I'll show the Electric-chair pictures and the Dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures."

- Andy Warhol

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"I guess it was the big plane crash picture [why Warhol started his 'Death'-series], the front page of a newspaper: '129 DIED'. I was also painting the Marilyns [the Marylin Monroe portraits, Warhol started after her tragic death in 1962] I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time that you turned on the radio they said something like '4 millions are going to die'. That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect."

- Andy Warhol

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"I started those [the 'Elisabeth Taylor' pictures, Warhol made from a publicity photo of her 1960 film BUtterfield 8 a long time ago when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die [but she recovered]. Now I'm doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes. My next series will be pornographic pictures, they will look blank; when you turn on the black lights, then you will see them - big breast and ... If a cop came in, then you could just flick out the lights or turn to the regular lights. How could you say that was pornography? ...Segal did a sculpture of two people making love, but he cut it all up, I guess because he thought it was too pornographic to be art ... The thing I like about it is that it makes you forget about style and that sort of things; style isn't really important."

- Andy Warhol

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"The name [Pop] sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop. it's so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use, are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham too, I think.. ..History books are being rewritten all the time."

- Andy Warhol

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"You'd be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes."

- Andy Warhol

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"(You'd be surprised who'll hang an electric chair in the living room. Especially if the background matches the drapes.)"

- Andy Warhol

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"(You wouldn't believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair? especially if it matches the color of their curtains.)"

- Andy Warhol

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"(You wouldn't believe how many people will hang a picture of an electric chair in their room – especially if the color of the picture matches the curtains.)"

- Andy Warhol

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"(You wouldn't believe the number of people who hang the electric chair painting in the homes, especially if the colour of the canvas matches the curtains.)"

- Andy Warhol

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"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.. .I see everything that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille. I just pass my hands over the surface of things. [1973]"

- Andy Warhol

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"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."

- Andy Warhol

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"I can never get over when you're on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own."

- Andy Warhol

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"It's the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.""

- Andy Warhol

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"At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I'd rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I'd never even seen before in my life started running after me to tell me things I'd just decided I didn't think it was a good idea to hear about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that's when I got what you might call a "following." As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I've found that to be absolutely axiomatic."

- Andy Warhol

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"During the 60's, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me. I don't really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the '60's I never thought in terms of "love" again."

- Andy Warhol

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"I don't see anything wrong with being alone, it feels great to me. People make a big thing about personal love. It doesn't have to be such a big thing. The same for living - people make a big thing about that too. But personal living and personal loving are the two things the Eastern-type wise men don't think about."

- Andy Warhol

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"I love every "lib" movement there is, because after the "lib" the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they're not part of what is happening. For instance, single people looking for husbands and wives used to feel left out because the image marriage had in the old days was so wonderful. w:Jane Wyatt and Robert Young. w:Nick and Nora Charles, Ethel and Fred Mertz, Dagwood and Blondie."

- Andy Warhol

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"What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological 'For instance's. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn't apply to you, at least it was a documentary, it could apply to somebody you knew and it could clear up some questions you had about them."

- Andy Warhol

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"I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty."

- Andy Warhol

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"I really don't care that much about "Beauties." What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It's not "talkies." Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something. Which isn't necessarily bad, it's just that I don't know what it is they're being. It's more fun to be with people who are doing things."

- Andy Warhol

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"When you're interested in somebody, and you think they might be interested in you, you should point out all your beauty problems and defects right away, rather than take a chance they won't notice them.. .On the other hand, say you have a purely temporary beauty problem—a new pimple, lackluster hair, no-sleep eyes, five extra pounds around the middle. Still, whatever it is, you should point it out.. .If you don't point out these things they might think that your temporary beauty problem is a permanent beauty problem.. .If they really do like you for yourself, they'll be willing to use their imagination to think of what you must look like without your temporary beauty problem."

- Andy Warhol

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"In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like "charming" and "clever" and "pretty" are all put-downs; all the lighter things in life, which are the most important things, are put down."

- Andy Warhol

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"I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do."

- Andy Warhol

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"The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet."

- Andy Warhol

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"I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet."

- Andy Warhol

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"Before I was shot [June, 1968], I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television - you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

- Andy Warhol

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"I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep."

- Andy Warhol

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"After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn't work because they need the exercise and they've got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them even more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it's too much work. But if you have the time for it, and if you need that exercise—then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you're an energy-getter or an energy-loser. As I said, I'm an energy-loser. But I can understand it when I see people running around trying to get some."

- Andy Warhol

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"I thought that young people had more problems than old people, and I hoped I could last until I was older so I wouldn't have all those problems. Then I looked around and saw that everybody who looked young had young problems and that everybody who looked old had old problems. The "old" problems to me looked easier to take than the "young" problems. So I decided to go gray so nobody would know now old I was and I would look younger to them than how old they thought I was. I would gain a lot by going gray: (1) I would have old problems, which were easier to take than young problems, (2) everyone would be impressed by how young I looked, and (3) I would be relieved of the responsibility of acting young—I could occasionally lapse into eccentricity or senility and no one would think anything of it because of my gray hair. When you've got gray hair, every move you make seems "young" and "spry," instead of just being normally active. It's like you're getting a new talent. So I dyed my hair gray when I was about twenty-three or twenty-four."

- Andy Warhol

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"The President has so much good publicity potential that hasn't been exploited. He should just sit down one day and make a list of all the things that people are embarrassed to do that they shouldn't be embarrassed to do, and then do them all on television."

- Andy Warhol

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"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

- Andy Warhol

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"Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of w:Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of w:The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American."

- Andy Warhol

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"Sometimes you're invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it's going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can't remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball."

- Andy Warhol

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"They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

- Andy Warhol

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"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." "My mother didn't love me." So what. "My husband won't ball me." So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget."

- Andy Warhol

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"I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more. I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it. That's why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn't have to think about getting old-looking."

- Andy Warhol

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"I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it."

- Andy Warhol

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"I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them."

- Andy Warhol

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"When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space."

- Andy Warhol

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"Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else's space for a while and pretend you're a part of it. You can sit in the Plaza Hotel and you don't even have to live there. You can just sit and watch the people go by."

- Andy Warhol

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"Somebody said that Bertolt Brecht [German socialist writer of political theater] wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here [in America] all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way."

- Andy Warhol

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"Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called 'art' or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippies era people put down the idea of business – they'd say 'Money is bad', and 'Working is bad', but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

- Andy Warhol

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"When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right'. As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything."

- Andy Warhol

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"A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the 'Factory' was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that's absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren't particularly interested in seeing me; they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who came."

- Andy Warhol

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"The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all. (1960's)"

- Andy Warhol

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"Edward Lucie-Smith: Would you like to see your pictures on as many walls as possible, then? Andy Warhol: Uh, no, I like them in closets."

- Andy Warhol

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"Edward Lucie-Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one? Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that. Edward Lucie-Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting? Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music. Edward Lucie-Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music? Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah."

- Andy Warhol

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"Edward Lucie-Smith: What do you think is the characteristic of a really nice person? Some people you obviously do like more than others. Andy Warhol: Ummm, well, if they talk a lot. Edward Lucie-Smith: What, and don't make you talk? Andy Warhol: Yeah, yes, that's a really nice person. Edward Lucie-Smith: Thank you, Andy."

- Andy Warhol

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"I still care about people but it would be so much easier not to care. I don't want to get to close: I don't like to touch things, that's why my work is so distant from myself [Nicolas Love, April 1987]"

- Andy Warhol

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"Sex is nostalgia for sex."

- Andy Warhol

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"Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing [actions shows on TV], as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel. (1960's)"

- Andy Warhol

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"In my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that's not the age we're living in."

- Andy Warhol

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"I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me."

- Andy Warhol

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"Warhol's art can both subvert (up to a point) formal art and, at the same time, offer socially provocative documents to the ordinary, white, middle-class citizen. Blacks and the poor do not like Warhol's art or movies. Documents that are mainly intended as deliberate references to a predominant white culture cannot incite the imaginations of those who don't give a fuck for that culture in the first place, even if they did understand what it was all about. This inability of Warhol to reach blacks and the poor represents the weakest aspect of his art. Warhol's art implies a certain disgust on the part of the artist for culture — a disgust he shares in common with New Left revolutionaries and progressive activist artists and critics. His latest decision, to stop painting altogether, is a deliberate step in the direction away from culture itself. It is also an inevitable step, as the very notion of art works that possess a quality as items to be traded upon the New York art exchange is incompatible with the socialization of art. Modern culture is a repressive, police agency. The police function of modern culture has been recognized by Warhol. His paintings of electric chairs, police attacks, most-wanted men, and car crashes all seem to reflect in art the reality of an official culture of repression rather than of life."

- Andy Warhol

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"I think he [Andy Warhol] would be very interested in the moment that the w:Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always.. .Also when he was here (in Germany) last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think."

- Andy Warhol

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"I'll give you an interesting analogy here. Have you ever read w:Carson McCullers' w:The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter? All right. Now in that book you'll remember that this deaf mute, Mr. Singer, this person who doesn't communicate at all, is finally revealed in a subtle way to be a completely empty, heartless person. And yet because he's a deaf mute, he symbolizes things to desperate people. They come to him and tell him all their troubles. They cling to him as a source of strength, as a kind of semi-religious figure in their lives. Andy is kind of like Mr. Singer. Desperate, lost people find their way to him, looking for some sort of salvation, and Andy sort of sits back like a deaf mute with very little to offer."

- Andy Warhol

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"He was a slight man who wore a white wig."

- Andy Warhol

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"This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage etc. [Duchamp is referring to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,] is an easy way out and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-made's and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."

- Andy Warhol

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"No director in human history has ever made or will ever make worse movies. Warhol makes Ed Wood look like Ingmar Bergman."

- Andy Warhol

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"In a strange way, Andy attracted attention because of his wig and his blank personality, which were both really disguises. I saw him at a party once at the Sculls' in Great Neck. He was quiet, polite, and odd, but without any of the posing that he later affected. He was a very single-minded person; he had this drive to work, work, work."

- Andy Warhol

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"Warhol--for whom Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe was as much an art object as any consumable artifact, and who was himself the celebrity-artist par excellence--was arguably more responsible than anyone else for obliterating the line between the avant-garde (which was supposed to appeal to an elite and be disturbing and subversive) and mass art (which was supposed to reach millions and reinforce the American dream)."

- Andy Warhol

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"Excuse my dust."

- Dorothy Parker

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"And she had It. It, hell; she had Those."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario."

- Dorothy Parker

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"And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

- Dorothy Parker

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"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment."

- Dorothy Parker

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"A lady ... with all the poise of the Sphinx though but little of her mystery."

- Dorothy Parker

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"The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The ones I like ... are "cheque" and "enclosed.""

- Dorothy Parker

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"And I'll stay away from Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds."

- Dorothy Parker

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"I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things."

- Dorothy Parker

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"I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more."

- Dorothy Parker

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"One more drink and I'd have been under the host."

- Dorothy Parker

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"It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven."

- Dorothy Parker

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"There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words."

- Dorothy Parker

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"It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes."

- Dorothy Parker

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"All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me."

- Dorothy Parker

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"[On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know? (Coolidge was known as a man who said very few words.)"

- Dorothy Parker

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"There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Too fucking busy, and vice versa."

- Dorothy Parker

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"It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard."

- Dorothy Parker

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"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

- Dorothy Parker

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"What fresh hell can this be?"

- Dorothy Parker

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"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy."

- Dorothy Parker

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"That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them."

- Dorothy Parker

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"And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs Parker said, she wouldn't be at all surprised."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Katharine Hepburn delivered a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Dotty had Great Big Visions of Quietude. Dotty saw an Ad, and it Left her Flat. Dotty had a Great Big Snifter of Cyanide. And that (said Dotty) Is that."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Almost overnight, Dorothy Parker was transformed from a woman of letters into a gin-soaked quote machine, with a martini in one hand and a dagger in the other. p. xiii"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Sinbad is produced in accordance with the fine old Shubert precept that nothing succeeds like undress. p. 6"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Anyone can do that—the stunt lies in not doing it. p. 8"

- Dorothy Parker

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"I thought that was going to be a good song, too, and then they went and rhymed “time” and “Rhine,” and spoiled everything. p. 24"

- Dorothy Parker

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"They exude an atmosphere of The New Republic—a sort of Crolier-than-thou air. p. 36"

- Dorothy Parker

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"There is one thing about Fiddlers Three, though, that held my attention all through the evening: Try as I might I could only discern two fiddlers. p. 42"

- Dorothy Parker

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"To quote the only line of Gertrude Stein's which I have ever been able to understand, "It is wonderful how I am not interested." p. 64"

- Dorothy Parker

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"You know how a play in dialect is. At the first act, you think, "How quaint!"; at the second act, you wish they would either stop using dialect or keep quiet; and at the third act, you wish you hadn't come. And Tillie, may I mention in passing, has four acts. p. 64"

- Dorothy Parker

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"If the English version is in what, in our youth, we used to speak of affectionately as dear old iambic pentameter, the actors mercifully abstain from reciting it that way; they speak their lines as good, hardy prose. p. 76"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The musical comedies of the month are She’s a Good Fellow and The Lady in Red, both of which owe their book and lyrics to Anne Caldwell—evidently a native of New York, judged by the casualness with which she rhymes “teacher” and “reach a.” p. 82"

- Dorothy Parker

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"And you remember, Rabbi Wise has declared, in a heated moment, that our plays seem to be written for the hosiery buyers. If Dr. Wise had only witnessed our new summer reviews, he doubtless would have amended his statement to “read by the hosiery buyers.” p.89"

- Dorothy Parker

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"This use of soldiers to make a play popular seems too much like taking an unfair advantage of the uniform—hitting below the Sam Browne belt, as it were. p. 93"

- Dorothy Parker

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"In short, there is everything about this season's entertainment to make the Hippodrome what it always is—a Temple of the Arts to all those who hang pennants on their automobiles, use “Shake hands with my friend” as a formula for introduction, and sprinkle powdered sugar on their sliced tomatoes. p. 106"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The play holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinée. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many. p. 121"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Writing a book for the Follies seems to be about as profitable an occupation as furnishing flannel petticoats for the showgirls. p. 151"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The management's method of procedure is evidently to hire some well-known man to write the book, and then, as soon as it is written, to give it away to some deserving family, and go out and engage an assortment of specialty acts. p. 151"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Van and Schenck put their songs over so skillfully that it isn't until their act is all done that you realize what extremely indifferent songs they are. Now, when John Steel is singing, on the other hand, you are never fooled for a moment. p.153"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Mr. Hodge plays with his accustomed ease, even carrying the thing so far as to repeat many of his lines with his eyes shut; and in a pretty spirit of reciprocity, many members of the audience sit through the play with their eyes shut. p. 175"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Of course, there are many things to be said for the afternoon performance, chief among them being that it cuts in so generously on one's work. p. 201"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Naturally, you know how you would feel on setting out to see a performance of Aucassin and Nicolette done by a company of little ones; you would strive to hurl yourself beneath the wheels of a friendly truck, on your way to the theatre. p. 233"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Bringing in a wounded soldier is getting to be rather like waving an American flag at the end of an act. One cannot harbor feelings of unmixed admiration for the playwright who will hide behind either of them. p. 250"

- Dorothy Parker

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"So seeing that there is nothing further to say, I shall go right on talking about The Circle, thus proving that I am a born reviewer of plays. p. 256"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Rockliffe Fellowes gives a likable performance of the secondary crook's rôle, and there are some decidedly agreeable-looking doughnuts consumed in the first act. And that is about all one can say for Pot Luck. p. 260"

- Dorothy Parker

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"If you arrive late, you won't know what anything is about, and if you are there all the way from the beginning, you won't care. p. 277"

- Dorothy Parker

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"There is one thing that appreciably eases the strain for the plays that arrive at this time of year, and that is that practically nothing is expected of them. p. 306"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The murdered man meets his death in an intriguing and novel manner, which the management asks its customers, as a personal favor, not to reveal to possible future audiences. It remains a secret, chummily shared by those that have seen the play and the four or five million who read it in its original form as a Saturday Evening Post story a year or so ago. p. 320"

- Dorothy Parker

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"It is advertised as “a seagoin’ comedy,” and anytime they go leaving off the final g that way, you know what to expect. p. 324"

- Dorothy Parker

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"Two things made The Dice of the Gods, another play about drugs, seem much better than it had any real right to seem. One was that Morphia had come first, and once you had seen Morphia, nothing seemd so very terrible to you. p. 375"

- Dorothy Parker

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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Age Before Beauty." "Pearls Before Swine."

- Dorothy Parker

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"If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, just look at those to whom he gives it."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Upon my honor I saw a Madonna Standing in a niche Over the door Of the glamorous whore Of a prominent son of a bitch."

- Dorothy Parker

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"How odd Of God To choose The Jews"

- Dorothy Parker

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"I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I'm under the table, After four I'm under my host."

- Dorothy Parker

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"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

- Dorothy Parker

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"72 suburbs in search of a city"

- Dorothy Parker

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks."

- Dorothy Parker

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"It was easy to get a crush on Dottie Parker as she sent you flattering telegrams on your birthday, your show opening and whenever she thought you were slipping from her grasp. Her equipment was witty telegrams, vers de société and kisses on the lips when you aimed for her cheek. [...] One time Dottie and I decided to go to the Royalton to see Mister Benchley who was the most individual character I ever met. Benchley was half undressed and went on undressing to go to bed. Dottie said she was sleepy too, took off her hat and dress, and got into an enormous waste basket that looked like a giant's cradle made of leather. Dottie curled up. I said I was sleepy too, and, shedding my clothes, was starting to climb in with Dottie when Mr. Benchley's wife Gertrude made an unexpected appearance. "Hello, Gertrude," said Dottie. "Howard and I decided to drop in.""

- Dorothy Parker

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"Dorothy Parker arrived at the Island one day with a huge suitcase which, when opened, contained only a large picture hat. She spent a week at Lake Bomoseen practically naked. Her figure was as eloquent as her verses."

- Dorothy Parker

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"Everything I've ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker."

- Dorothy Parker

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"She is a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth."

- Dorothy Parker

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"[In the aftermath of the death of Parker's husband Alan] A woman who had been fond of Alan and who had always pretended to like her, although Dorothy doubted it, came over to offer condolences and assistance, as had many people that evening. How could she help? she asked. "Get me a new husband," Dorothy replied without a flicker of emotion."

- Dorothy Parker

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"... and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones ... But those were Foreign Children and it really didn't matter ..."

- Dr. Seuss

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"You make 'em, I amuse 'em."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack."

- Dr. Seuss

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"When at last we are sure You've been properly pilled, Then a few paper forms Must be properly filled So that you and your heirs May be properly billed."

- Dr. Seuss

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"You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them."

- Dr. Seuss

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"And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street."

- Dr. Seuss

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"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant An elephant's faithful, One hundred percent."

- Dr. Seuss

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"On the 15th of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, He was splashing... enjoying the jungle's great joys... When Horton the elephant heard a small noise."

- Dr. Seuss

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"A person's a person, no matter how small."

- Dr. Seuss

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"My friends!", cried the elephant. "Tell me! Do tell! Are you safe? Are you sound? Are you whole? Are you well?"

- Dr. Seuss

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"You're going to be roped! And you're going to be caged! And, as for your dust speck – hah! That we shall boil in a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut Oil!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"Don't give up! I believe in you all. A person's a person, no matter how small! And you very small persons will not have to die If you make yourselves heard! So come on, now, and TRY!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"This", cried the Mayor, "is your town's darkest hour! The time for all Whos who have blood that is red To come to the aid of their country!", he said. "We've GOT to make noises in greater amounts! So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"Oh the things you can find If you don't stay behind!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"In the places I go there are things that I see That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z. I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"So, on beyond Z! It's high time you were shown That you really don't know All there is to be known."

- Dr. Seuss

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"The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day."

- Dr. Seuss

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"We looked! Then we saw him Step in on the mat! We looked! And we saw him! The Cat in the Hat!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"Maybe Christmas...", he thought, "...Doesn't come from a store." "Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"Well, in Who-ville they say That the Grinch's small heart Grew 3 sizes that day."

- Dr. Seuss

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"And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see. And the turtles, of course... all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be."

- Dr. Seuss

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"I know up on top you are seeing great sights, But down here on the bottom, We too should have rights."

- Dr. Seuss

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"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere."

- Dr. Seuss

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"If you never did You should. These things are fun. and Fun is good.'"

- Dr. Seuss

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"I am Sam. Sam-I-Am."

- Dr. Seuss

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"That Sam-I-Am! That Sam-I-Am! I do not like that Sam-I-Am!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-Am!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"I pulled, pulled, and pulled. And the next thing I knew, I was pulling the camel and Wubble-Chap too! "Now really," I thought, "this is rather unfair!" But he said, "Don't you stew. I am doing my share. "This is called teamwork. I furnish the brains. You furnish the muscles, the aches and the pains. I'll pick the best roads, tell you just where to go, And we'll find a good doctor more quickly, you know." Then he sat and he worked with his brains and his tongue And he bossed me around just because I was young. He told me go left. Then he told me go right. And that's what he told me all day and all night."

- Dr. Seuss

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"A big man on a horse scared me out of my wits. He bellowed, "I'm General Genghis Kahn Schmitz. There's a war going on! And it's time that you knew Every lad in this land has his duty to do. We're marching to battle. We need you, my boy! We're about to attack. We're about to destroy The Perilous Poozer of Pompelmoose Pass! So get into line. You're a Private, First Class.""

- Dr. Seuss

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"I'd have no more troubles... That's what the man said. So I started to go. But I didn't. Instead .... I did some quick thinking Inside of my head. Then I started back home To the Valley of Vung.I know I'll have troubles. I'll maybe get stung. I'll always have troubles. I'll maybe get bit By that Green-Headed Quail On the place where I sit. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see. Now my troubles are going To have troubles with me!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"Mister!" he said with a sawdusty sneeze. "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" – He was very upset as he shouted and puffed – "What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"

- Dr. Seuss

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"I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please! But I'm also in charge of the brown Bar-ba-loots, Who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits, And happily lived, eating Truffula fruits. Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, There's not enough Truffula fruit to go 'round! And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

- Dr. Seuss

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"So . . . Catch!" calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. "It's a Truffula Seed. It's the last one of all! You're in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky was my big empty factory... the Lorax... and I. The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance, just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance, as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants. And I'll never forget the grim look on his face when he heisted himself and took leave of this place, through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace. And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks with the one word: UNLESS. Whatever that meant . . . well, I just couldn't guess."

- Dr. Seuss

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"It's a troublesome world. All the people who're in it are troubled with troubles almost every minute. You oughta be thankful, a whole heaping lot, For the places and people you're lucky you're not!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"And suppose that you lived in that forest in France Where the average young person just hasn't a chance To escape from the perilous pants-eating plants! But your pants are safe! You're a fortunate guy. And you ought to be shouting, "How lucky am I!""

- Dr. Seuss

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"Thank goodness for all the things you are not! Thank goodness you're not something someone forgot, and left all alone in some punkerish place like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space."

- Dr. Seuss

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"That's why I say, "Duckie! Don’t grumble! Don’t stew! Some critters are much-much, oh, ever so much-much, so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!""

- Dr. Seuss

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"The more that you read, The more things you will know. The more that you learn, The more places you'll go."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Young cat! If you keep Your eyes open enough, Oh, the stuff you will learn! The most wonderful stuff!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"you'll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut"

- Dr. Seuss

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."

- Dr. Seuss

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"With your head full of brains, and your shoes full of feet, You're too smart to go down any not-so-good-street."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Out there things can happen, and frequently do, To people as brainy and footsy as you. And when things start to happen, don't worry, don't stew. Just go right along, you'll start happening too!"

- Dr. Seuss

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"You're off to great places. Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way."

- Dr. Seuss

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"[...] right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: “Brothers!” It is a rather flabby battle cry. If we want to win, we've got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory."

- Dr. Seuss

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"Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."

- Dr. Seuss

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"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."

- Dr. Seuss

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"You want my opinion? We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love."

- Dr. Seuss

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"The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. ... "Man was not made to sweat." "That's so. See what it has done to their flesh." "Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too." "You have eaten of it?" "Once." ... Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles ... there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly ... "We cannot eat them," one said. "Why not?" "There are too many of them." "That's true," a third said. "Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man." ... "It means work," the third said. "Let the Negroes do it," the first said. ... "Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating.""

- William Faulkner

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"For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid... and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy."

- William Faulkner

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"Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be."

- William Faulkner

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"It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."

- William Faulkner

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"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this ... as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it."

- William Faulkner

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"Mr. Khrushchev says that Communism, the police state, will bury the free ones. He is a smart gentleman, he knows that this is nonsense since freedom, man's dim concept of and belief in the human spirit is the cause of all his troubles in his own country. But if he means that Communism will bury capitalism, he is correct. That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling. Because simple man, the human race, will bury both of them. That will be when we have expended the last grain, dram, and iota of our natural resources. But man himself will not be in that grave. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next."

- William Faulkner

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"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."

- William Faulkner

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"Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat."

- William Faulkner

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"Some folks wouldn't even speak when they passed me on the street. Then MGM came to town to film Intruder in the Dust, and that made some difference because I'd brought money into Oxford [Mississippi]. But it wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand thirty thousand dollars."

- William Faulkner

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"Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find."

- William Faulkner

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"Civilization," mused Bill once, "started with distillation."

- William Faulkner

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"There is no such thing," meditated Bill, "as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damnfool if he doesn't."

- William Faulkner

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"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."

- William Faulkner

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"Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say."

- William Faulkner

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"When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger."

- William Faulkner

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"Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets."

- William Faulkner

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"Dilsey stroked Ben's lower head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily."

- William Faulkner

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"When the shadow of the sash appeared in the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.""

- William Faulkner

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"A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune."

- William Faulkner

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"Clocks slay time. ... Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

- William Faulkner

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"Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves."

- William Faulkner

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"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end."

- William Faulkner

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"I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town."

- William Faulkner

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"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."

- William Faulkner

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"How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home."

- William Faulkner

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"My mother is a fish."

- William Faulkner

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"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

- William Faulkner

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"Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words."

- William Faulkner

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"People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."

- William Faulkner

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"Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down."

- William Faulkner

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"Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."

- William Faulkner

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"They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because state's money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state's money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don't know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is."

- William Faulkner

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"Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams."

- William Faulkner

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"Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing."

- William Faulkner

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"... a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from.’"

- William Faulkner

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"Poor man. Poor mankind."

- William Faulkner

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"Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie."

- William Faulkner

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"Memory believes before knowing remembers."

- William Faulkner

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"... ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth."

- William Faulkner

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"We never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we would ever be brought to this, did we?You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough even to accept your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism."

- William Faulkner

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"Is Robert Ingersoll telling me that for twenty years I have leaned upon a reed no stronger than myself?"

- William Faulkner

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"It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly."

- William Faulkner

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"You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him."

- William Faulkner

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"Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?"

- William Faulkner

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"She accepted that—not reconciled: accepted-- as though there is a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God that is all; at least I know it all."

- William Faulkner

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"... but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realising that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger."

- William Faulkner

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"Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."

- William Faulkner

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"Happen is never once."

- William Faulkner

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"You are my brother. No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry."

- William Faulkner

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""Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?" "I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

- William Faulkner

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"... the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself."

- William Faulkner

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"... not sin, he thought, I don't believe in sin. It's getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death."

- William Faulkner

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"They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the one that dies."

- William Faulkner

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"...a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once."

- William Faulkner

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"I told you once how I believe it isn't love that dies, it's the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn't deserve the chance any more to love."

- William Faulkner

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"... when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief."

- William Faulkner

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"Frenchman's Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as the Old Frenchman's place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk's office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them."

- William Faulkner

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"He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men."

- William Faulkner

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"He will need to be just a little bigger than smart, and a little braver than either."

- William Faulkner

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"I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing age: I dont like to know that my orders have been disobeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they would be."

- William Faulkner

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"He recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe that’s what courage is, he thought."

- William Faulkner

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"The doctor didn't even take out his stethoscope nor even touch him. “He’s all right,” the doctor said. “He didn’t even catch cold. He just quit.” “Quit?” McCaslin said. “Yes. Old people do that sometimes. Then they get a good night’s sleep or maybe it’s just a drink of whisky, and they change their minds.”"

- William Faulkner

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"... in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ‘65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and salves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free."

- William Faulkner

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"... the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on), ..."

- William Faulkner

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"So let me say it: That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it: else why do you stand here relinquishing and repudiating? Held it, kept it for fifty years until you could repudiate it, while He—this Arbiter, this Architect, this Umpire—condoned—or did He? Looked down and saw—or did He? Or at least did nothing: saw, and could not, or did not see; saw, and would not, or perhaps He would not see—perverse, impotent, or blind: which?"

- William Faulkner

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"“Dont you see?” he cried. “Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your peoples’ turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Dont you see?”"

- William Faulkner

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"... leaving as next by seniority Stuart that gallant man born apparently already horsed and sabred and already knowing all there was to know about war except the slogging and brutal stupidity of it..."

- William Faulkner

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"You said how on that instant when Ikkemotubbe realised that he could sell the land to Grandfather, it ceased forever to have been his."

- William Faulkner

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"This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares.... No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge."

- William Faulkner

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"It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man."

- William Faulkner

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"It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim."

- William Faulkner

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"He [the writer] must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

- William Faulkner

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"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat...."

- William Faulkner

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"... I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking."

- William Faulkner

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"I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

- William Faulkner

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"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

- William Faulkner

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"... maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it."

- William Faulkner

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"... so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream."

- William Faulkner

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"The poets are wrong of course. ... But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it."

- William Faulkner

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"... between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought."

- William Faulkner

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"... even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but ... even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.... So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have nothing of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing."

- William Faulkner

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"... innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn't have to fear or be afraid."

- William Faulkner

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"You don't know very much about women, do you?" she said. "Women aren't interested in poets' dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn't even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam."

- William Faulkner

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"... women aren't interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they don't care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a saw-tooth edge."

- William Faulkner

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"... women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts."

- William Faulkner

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"She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? ... Because to the child, he was not created by his mother's and his father's passion or capacity for it. He couldn't have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl. ... and if a boy or a girl really is his father's and her mother's father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother's mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too."

- William Faulkner

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"... girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts."

- William Faulkner

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"Maybe I was completely wrong that morning when I said how women are only interested in facts because maybe men are just interested in facts too and the only difference is, women dont care whether they are facts or not just so they fit, and men dont care whether they fit or not just so they are facts."

- William Faulkner

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"Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it's just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not."

- William Faulkner

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"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies."

- William Faulkner

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"If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."

- William Faulkner

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"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."

- William Faulkner

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"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

- William Faulkner

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"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done."

- William Faulkner

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"Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn't care where it is ... the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in."

- William Faulkner

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"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky."

- William Faulkner

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"If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."

- William Faulkner

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"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."

- William Faulkner

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"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope."

- William Faulkner

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"There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp. I don't want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy."

- William Faulkner

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"The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."

- William Faulkner

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"Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible."

- William Faulkner

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"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."

- William Faulkner

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"Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

- William Faulkner

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"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."

- William Faulkner

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"People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty."

- William Faulkner

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"If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't."

- William Faulkner

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"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse."

- William Faulkner

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"Or maybe married men dont even need reasons, being as they already got wives. Or maybe it's women that dont need reasons, for the simple reason that they never heard of a reason and wouldn't recognise it face to face, since they dont function from reasons but from necessities that couldn't nobody help nohow and that dont nobody but a fool man want to help in the second place, because he dont know no better; it aint women, it's men that takes ignorance seriously, getting into a skeer [scare] over something for no more reason than that they dont happen to know what it is."

- William Faulkner

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"Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity."

- William Faulkner

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"At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything."

- William Faulkner

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"... life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion."

- William Faulkner

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"Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too."

- William Faulkner

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"Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn't important, it wasn't really there."

- William Faulkner

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"Save us, Christ, the poor sons of bitches."

- William Faulkner

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"... Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; it at least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you; and his, Stevens's, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving."

- William Faulkner

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"No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment."

- William Faulkner

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"That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading."

- William Faulkner

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"You write a story to tell about people, man in his constant struggle with his own heart, with the hearts of others, or with his environment. It's man in the ageless, eternal struggles which we inherit and we go through as though they'd never happened before, shown for a moment in a dramatic instant of the furious motion of being alive, that's all any story is. You catch this fluidity which is human life and you focus a light on it and you stop it long enough for people to be able to see it.""

- William Faulkner

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"When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size. But Boon didn't know this. He must seduce me. And he had so little time: only from the time the train left until dark."

- William Faulkner

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"A gentleman can live through anything."

- William Faulkner

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"Faulkner in Dry September — or Light in August, or even in The Sound and the Fury — can really get at (as you put it, "to the bone") the truth of what the black-white relationship is in the South, and how what a dark force it is in the Southern personality. At the same time, Faulkner, as a man, as a citizen of Mississippi, is committed to what in Mississippi seems to be their past. It is one thing for Faulkner to deal with the Negro in his imagination, where he can control him; and quite another thing to deal with him in life, where he can't control him. In life, obviously the Negro, the uncontrollable Negro, simply is determined to overthrow everything in which Faulkner imagines himself to believe. It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life."

- William Faulkner

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"It is difficult for a young person today to know what to do. You cannot take advertising seriously; you cannot be truly involved with selling, or respect yourself, if the product you make is meant to become obsolete in a year or two. There is very little real, important work to do. And where there is no work, something goes, because we discover through working what we cannot discover any other way. As Faulkner says, you cannot make love eight hours a day, or drink or walk eight hours a day. You have to do something with your life, you have to find out what it is."

- William Faulkner

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"What's the difference between regional being the Southwest and regional being the South if the story is brilliant enough to be universal? Does it matter that Faulkner's universe was little? When he finished Absalom, Absalom, it wasn't about Mississippi; it was about the cosmos. So if a book like that is written by a Puerto Rican or a Native American, why should it continue to be taught as ethnic literature?"

- William Faulkner

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"Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob."

- William Faulkner

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"Apparently the entire population of Jefferson, Mississippi consists of rhetoricians who would blanch at the sight of a simple declarative sentence ... Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book except that it seems to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent."

- William Faulkner

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"Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one."

- William Faulkner

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"I am the child of a bilingual family that delights in tongue acrobatics of mixed syntax and vocabulary. We write as we speak, in run-on sentences (if Faulkner could do it and be called great, why can't we?)"

- William Faulkner

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"Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good-and universal-because it is specifically about a particular world. That's what I wish to do."

- William Faulkner

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"I see the world very much in a Faulkner kind of way. People keep reappearing for me; all those women I knew in their thirties with small children when that first book came out in '59-I still know them now. There's still a lot of them around. And so I don't see life in what used to be called an alienated way. I see people going away and coming back. And I think a lot of people live that way; I don't think I'm so alone in that."

- William Faulkner

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"The greatness of a writer has nothing to do with subject matter itself, only with how much the subject matter touches the author. It is the density of style which counts. Through Hemingway's style you feel matter, iron, wood. I admire Hemingway but I prefer what I know of Faulkner. Light in August is a marvelous book."

- William Faulkner

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"What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!"

- Philip Wylie

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"There is no advance without strife."

- Philip Wylie

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"The waiters all are rude. The bellboys scream and yell. The swill is better than the food. Goddamn the Mills Hotel."

- Philip Wylie

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"But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national."

- Philip Wylie

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"Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression."

- Philip Wylie

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"The blame for Armageddon lies on man. And the millennium will come only when the average man exhibits a scientific integrity about all he is and does — instead of half of it. Many a psychological Archimedes has put signposts on the hard road man must follow if he is to avoid self-destruction and come into his own. A few very great modern scientists have added to the lore. Indications of what man may expect of himself are everywhere at hand. But most men must first be persuaded that the task lies ahead and not behind — that we are infants still, with loaded guns for toys."

- Philip Wylie

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"Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion."

- Philip Wylie

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"The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems — have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts."

- Philip Wylie

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"Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light."

- Philip Wylie

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"Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not."

- Philip Wylie

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"There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church — or even of a city — or a state; it is a function of all mankind."

- Philip Wylie

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"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

- Truman Capote

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"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year."

- Truman Capote

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"It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."

- Truman Capote

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"A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."

- Truman Capote

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"The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell."

- Truman Capote

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"The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory."

- Truman Capote

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"Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure."

- Truman Capote

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"She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

- Truman Capote

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"But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes"

- Truman Capote

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"Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it."

- Truman Capote

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"“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”"

- Truman Capote

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"I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can't stand it. Though—I don't know. Some queers I really liked. As long as they didn't try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer."

- Truman Capote

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"She had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part [...]? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal."

- Truman Capote

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"Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have."

- Truman Capote

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"“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.”"

- Truman Capote

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"“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”"

- Truman Capote

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"“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”"

- Truman Capote

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"“They [the Clutters] never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it's just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”"

- Truman Capote

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"In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. [...] However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune [...]."

- Truman Capote

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"I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff."

- Truman Capote

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"All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love."

- Truman Capote

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"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

- Truman Capote

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"Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right."

- Truman Capote

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"[You've said your material chooses you.] That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman—-the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote."

- Truman Capote

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"People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie. But in a friendship you don't do that. You do exactly the reverse. You try more and more to be as completely pure and straight as you can be."

- Truman Capote

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"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

- Truman Capote

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"not since the early work of Eudora Welty has there been an example of such striking literary virtuosity. Even if Mr. Capote were ten or twenty years older than he is, his powers of description and evocation, his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and for the varied rhythms of speech would be remarkable. In one so young this much skill represents a kind of genius. On the other hand, I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote's novel. In Mr. Capote's case, as with so many of our gifted contemporary artists, I would freely trade eighty percent of his technical skill for twenty percent more value in the uses to which it is put."

- Truman Capote

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"All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

- David Lynch

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"The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing."

- David Lynch

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"I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead."

- David Lynch

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"When you're an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. It's not like you're sitting down, thinking, "What can I do to really mess things up?" You're getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape. And if you're honest about it and you're thinking about characters and what they do, you now see that your ideas are about trouble. You're feeling more depth, and you're describing something that is going on in some way."

- David Lynch

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"In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point."

- David Lynch

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"The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you're going to go ... the mood is what you're looking for, and somehow we always find it."

- David Lynch

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"When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite."

- David Lynch

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"Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It's like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time."

- David Lynch

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"I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school ... For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude."

- David Lynch

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"A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it."

- David Lynch

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"I'm not a political person. ... I don't understand politics, I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward. Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know? It could be a beautiful place. There's many little obstacles and there's many, many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward."

- David Lynch

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"My cow is not pretty, but it's pretty to me."

- David Lynch

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"Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too."

- David Lynch

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"There's this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious and can be enlivened by the group process. This group is a peace-creating group. It saturates the atmosphere. This is all about establishing peace. Right now, we gotta get peace back in the world. Peace is a real thing."

- David Lynch

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"Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it ... I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there's suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it's people kind of going in circles. It's fantastic. It's like a strange carnival: it's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of pain."

- David Lynch

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"Speaking in front of a large crowd is not pleasant. Once it gets rolling, it's okay. But beforehand, it's murder. I'm getting a lot better. The first interview I ever did was in 1972, I believe, and I couldn't speak. I couldn't speak one word. I only said, "I painted it black." That was my one sentence. And so I have improved."

- David Lynch

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"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It is better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for someone else."

- David Lynch

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"The ocean of solutions is within, enliven that. ... It's a world of clues, a world of mystery but the mystery can get solved, you can find a lot of answers for these things within."

- David Lynch

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"There's so many problems in our world, so much negativity. Don't worry about the darkness — turn on the light and the darkness automatically goes. Ramp up the light of unity within — help do that for yourself, help do that for the world and then we're really doing something, we're doing something that brings that light of unity.""

- David Lynch

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"Bullshit, that's how I feel. Total fucking bullshit."

- David Lynch

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"It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real."

- David Lynch

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"The sick reality about our over dependance on language is that trying to live without it is like a blind and deaf man with no arms or legs trying to navigate a dark narrow cave, and the cave is full of tarantulas."

- David Lynch

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"There is a plot. What would be the point of just a bunch of things? There's a story, but the story can hold abstractions. I believe in story. I believe in characters. But I believe in a story that holds abstractions, and a story that can be told based on ideas that come in an unconventional way.""

- David Lynch

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"Language is an evil thing, a very evil thing. And a force to be reckoned with."

- David Lynch

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"Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you."

- David Lynch

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"I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination."

- David Lynch

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"I guess I got whacked hard in the mystery department when I was little. I found the world completely and totally fascinating then — it was like a dream. They say that people who think they had a happy childhood are blocking something out, but I think I really had one. Of course I had the usual fears, like going to school — I knew there was some sort of problem there. But every other person sensed that problem too, so my fears were pretty normal."

- David Lynch

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"There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery. It's possible to achieve a state where you realize the truth of life and fear disappears, and a lot of people have reached that state, but next to none of them are on Earth. There's probably a few."

- David Lynch

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"Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. People lived in towns and small farms where they knew everybody and people didn't move around so much so things were a little more peaceful. There were things that they were afraid of for sure, but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety level of the people is in the stratosphere. TV sped things up and caused people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle, and drugs also had a lot to do with it. With drugs people can get so rich and whacked out and they've opened up a whole weird world. These things have created a modern kind of fear in America."

- David Lynch

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"One change of attitude would change everything. If everyone realized that it could be a beautiful world and said let's not do these things anymore — let's have fun."

- David Lynch

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"There are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery and a mystery means there's a puzzle to be solved. Once you think like that you're hooked on probably finding a meaning, and there' many avenues in life where we're given little indications that the mystery can one day be solved. we get little proofs, — not the big proof — but the little proofs that keep us searching."

- David Lynch

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"When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don't know if it's a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing and that's not what I'm interested in. I want to do certain things and make them right in my mind and that's it."

- David Lynch

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"Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful."

- David Lynch

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"When I first heard about meditation, I had zero interest in it. I wasn't even curious. It sounded like a waste of time. What got me interested, though, was the phrase "true happiness lies within." At first I thought it sounded kind of mean, because it doesn't tell you where the "within" is, or how to get there. But still it had a ring of truth. And I began to think that maybe meditation was a way to go within."

- David Lynch

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"When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger. I often took out this anger on my first wife. After I had been meditating for about two weeks, she came to me and said, "What's going on?" I was quiet for a moment. But finally I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "This anger, where did it go?" And I hadn't even realized that it had lifted. I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It's suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom. Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they are like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They are like a vise grip on creativity. If you're in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas."

- David Lynch

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"I started out just as a regular person, growing up in the Northwest. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, studying trees. So I was in the woods a lot. And the woods for a child are magical. I lived in what people call small towns. My world was what would be considered about a city block, maybe two blocks. Everything occurred in that space. All the dreaming, all my friends existed in that small world. But to me it seemed so huge and magical. There was plenty of time available to dream and be with friends. I liked to paint and I liked to draw. And I often thought, wrongly, that when you got to be an adult, you stopped painting and drawing and did something more serious."

- David Lynch

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"I'm not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you've got time and sequences. You've got dialogue. You've got music. You've got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can't be conveyed any other way. It's a magical medium. For me, it's so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It's not just words or music — it's a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn't exist before. It's telling stories. It's devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film."

- David Lynch

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"I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with. So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen."

- David Lynch

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"An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life. It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It's the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It's a hopeful puzzle piece. In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song — Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet". The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it. You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you've got it, the rest will come in time."

- David Lynch

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"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is. Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent. I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was."

- David Lynch

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"On Blue Velvet, I worked with a casting director, Johanna Ray. And we had all brought up Dennis Hopper. But everybody said, 'No, no; you can't work with Dennis. He's really in bad shape, and you'll have nothing but trouble.' So we continued looking for people. But one day, Dennis' agent called and said that Dennis was clean and sober and had already done another picture, and I could talk to that director to verify it. Then Dennis called and said, 'I have to play Frank, because I am Frank.' That thrilled me, and scared me."

- David Lynch

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"People have asked me why — if meditation is so great and gives you so much bliss — are my films so dark, and there's so much violence? There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world right now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. They're stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They're going to have highs and lows, and good and bad. I fall in love with certain ideas. And I am where I am. Now, if I told you I was enlightened, and this is enlightened filmmaking, that would be another story. But I'm just a guy from Missoula, Montana, doing my thing, going down the road like everybody else. We all reflect the world we live in. Even if you make a period film, it will reflect your times. You can see the way period films differ, depending on when they were made. It's a sensibility — how they talk, certain themes — and those things change as the world changes. And so, even though I'm from Missoula, Montana, which is not the surrealistic capital of the world, you could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things."

- David Lynch

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"Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate. It's very important to experience that Self, that pure consciousness. It's really helped me. I think it would help any filmmaker. So start diving within, enlivening that bliss consciousness. Grow in happiness and intuition. Experience the joy of doing. And you'll glow in this peaceful way. Your friends will be very, very happy with you. Everyone will want to sit next to you. And people will give you money!"

- David Lynch

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"You feel David in his movies — its another universe he takes you to — its an alternate reality but its close enough to our own that its scary."

- David Lynch

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"It's great when somebody breaks rules and says, "You know what? There doesn't have to be an answer to this. You don't have to have a fourth wall, you don't have to have any boundaries.""

- David Lynch

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"Jimmy Stewart from Mars."

- David Lynch

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"It was curious, so much was in his mind, but he didn't talk about what he was doing, so it was difficult sometimes to follow. He's quite a macabre person. He said to me one day: "You should take the kids to the London Hospital and look at all the freaks in the bottles, the two-headed babies." The actual Elephant Man was in there. He said: "You'll really enjoy it. Take some sandwiches and make a day of it.""

- David Lynch

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"One day he was showing me a painting he made. It was thick with oil, and right as he showed it to me a moth flew into the painting and got stuck — it flew around and its wings created a little circle in his painting, sort of like the death of a moth ... I thought David would pull the moth out and repaint it, but he fell in love with it the way it was."

- David Lynch

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"Luckily, David is able to vent everything through his art ... because otherwise somebody might be dead."

- David Lynch

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"Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalize them. David doesn't translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional. Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it's like fishing. He never knows what he's going to catch."

- David Lynch

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"I just tend to admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and just say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them. I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". It's a fine line."

- David Lynch

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"We did long for the pitter-patter of little feet, so we decided to buy a dog. Cheaper, and… get more feet."

- Rita Rudner

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"I love being married, I do. It's so great to find that one special person that you want to annoy for the rest of your life."

- Rita Rudner

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"Well, the old theory was "marry an older man because they're more mature". But the new theory is "men don't mature — marry a young one"."

- Rita Rudner

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"My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives."

- Rita Rudner

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"Whenever I date a guy, I think, "Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?""

- Rita Rudner

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"My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married, and I didn't want him to."

- Rita Rudner

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"Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be."

- Rita Rudner

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"My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head."

- Rita Rudner

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"I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry."

- Rita Rudner

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"To me, life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside."

- Rita Rudner

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"[One of my friends] was in labor for 36 hours. (I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.)"

- Rita Rudner

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"Envy the kangaroo. That pouch setup is extraordinary; the baby crawls out of the womb when it is about two inches long, gets into the pouch, and proceeds to mature. I'd have a baby if it would develop in my handbag."

- Rita Rudner

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"I don't even know how this word came into being: "aerobics". I guess gym instructors got together and said, "If we're going to charge ten dollars an hour, we can't call it 'jumping up and down'.""

- Rita Rudner

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"Nobody is really happy with what's on their head. People with straight hair want curly, people with curly want straight, and bald people want everyone to be blind."

- Rita Rudner

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"Why are women wearing perfumes that smell like flowers to attract men? Men don't like flowers. I have a great idea for a scent that will attract men — how about "New Car Interior"?"

- Rita Rudner

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"I had teeth that stuck out so far, I used to eat other kids' candy bars by accident."

- Rita Rudner

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"During one scene, I had to do a shooting drill. He put a psychological spin on it."

- Alex D. Linz

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"I was brought up in a very logical place," said Linz, who had his bar mitzvah at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. "But I think they would [happen]."

- Alex D. Linz

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"You can't beat white people, you can only knock them out."

- Chris Rock

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"You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips."

- Chris Rock

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"I hope that Live Earth ends global warming the same way the Live Aid ended world poverty."

- Chris Rock

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"Comedy is the blues for people who can't sing."

- Chris Rock

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"Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special."

- Chris Rock

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"Our next presenter is the first woman to ever breast-feed an Apple – Gwyneth Paltrow."

- Chris Rock

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"The only acting you ever see at the Oscars is when people act like they're not mad they lost. Nicole Kidman was smiling so wide, she should have won an Emmy at the Oscars for her great performance. I was like, "If you'd done that in the movie, you'd have won an Oscar, girl.""

- Chris Rock

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"Have you been watching American Idol? They have Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul judging the singing. Paula Abdul?! Getting Paula Abdul to judge a singing contest is like getting Christopher Reeve to judge a dance contest!"

- Chris Rock

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"When I heard they were trying and get rid of the word "nigga", I told my accountant to buy 800 shares of "coon"."

- Chris Rock

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"You won't be able to take your eyes off the next four presenters: Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz."

- Chris Rock

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"George Bush hates midgets."

- Chris Rock

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"Yo, what's up! This is Chris Rock, and I'm with my man Lil Jon, and we stay in the club! We live in the club! We die in the club! We get our car washed in the club! We go to school in the club! We go to the cleaners in the club! We do everything in the motherfucking club! We go to church in the club! We never leave the motherfucking club! We pay our taxes in the club! We go to library in the club!"

- Chris Rock

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"Black Santa Claus caused more tears than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays."

- Chris Rock

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"They don't want you to vote. If they did, we wouldn't vote on a Tuesday. In November. You ever throw a party on a Tuesday? No. Because nobody would come."

- Chris Rock

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"Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks"

- Chris Rock

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"[Interviewer asks: "How do you feel like things have changed over the past couple decades?"]<br"

- Chris Rock

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"You would think that cops would occasionally shoot a white kid, just to make it look good. You'd think every couple of months they'd look at their dead nigga calendar and go, "Oh my God, we're up to 16. We gotta shoot a white kid quick." "Uh, which one?" "The first one you see singing Cardi B." That's right. I mean, honestly, I wanna live in a world with real equality. I want to live in a world where an equal amount of white kids are shot every month. An equal world. I want to see white mothers on TV crying. Standing next to Al Sharpton. Talking about, "We need justice for Chad. We need justice for Chad. He was just coming home from racquetball practice.""

- Chris Rock

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"Here's the thing. I know it's hard being a cop. I know it's hard. I know that shit's dangerous. I know it is, OK? But some jobs can't have bad apples. OK? Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like— pilots. You know? American Airlines can't be like, "You know, most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples, that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.""

- Chris Rock

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"Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it, all right?"

- Chris Rock

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"Oh, wow! Wow! Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me. [...] That was a... greatest night in the history of television, okay."

- Chris Rock

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"Do you know what the good side of crack is? If you're up at the right hour, you can get a VCR for $1.50. You can furnish your whole house for $10.95."

- Chris Rock

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"A black man failing black history... ain't that some sad shit..... cuz you know, fat people don't fail cooking!"

- Chris Rock

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"People are starving all over the world, what do you mean, "red meat will kill you"? Don't eat no red meat? No, don't eat no green meat. If you lucky enough to get your hands on a steak, bite the shit out of it!"

- Chris Rock

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"We got so much food in America we're allergic to food. Allergic to food! Hungry people ain't allergic to shit. You think anyone in Rwanda's got a fucking lactose intolerance?!"

- Chris Rock

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"That shit wasn't about race &hellip; that shit was about fame. If O.J. wasn't famous, he'd be in jail right now. If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn't even be O.J. He'd be Orenthal the Bus Driving Murderer."

- Chris Rock

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"So you gotta look at OJ's situation. He's paying $25,000 a month in alimony, got another man driving around in his car and fucking his wife in a house he's still paying the mortgage on. Now I'm not saying he should have killed her... but I understand."

- Chris Rock

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"There's a lot of racism going on. Who's more racist, black people or white people? Black people! You know why? Because we hate black people too! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people. There's some shit going on with black people right now. It's like a civil war going on with black people. And there's two sides, there's black people and there's niggas. The niggas have got to go. Everytime a black person wanna have a good time, ignorant-ass niggas fuck it up. You can't have shit when you got niggas around, you can't have shit. You can't have no big screen TV! You can have it, but you better move it in at 3 in the morning. Paint it white, hope niggas think it's a bassinet. Can't have shit in your house! Why?! Because niggas will break into your house. Niggas will live next door to you break into your house, come over the next day and go, "I heard you got robbed." Nigga, you know you robbed me. You didn't see shit 'cause you was doing shit! You can't go see a movie opening day, you know why? 'Cause niggas is shooting at the screen! What kind of ignorant shit is that? "This movie's so good I gotta bust a cap in here!" You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!"

- Chris Rock

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"Community college is like a disco with books: "Here's ten dollars; let me get my learn on!""

- Chris Rock

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"Every man has to settle down eventually. You know why you gotta settle down eventually? Because you don't want to be the old guy in the club. You know what I'm talking about. Every club you go into, there's always some old guy. He ain't really old, just a little too old to be in the club."

- Chris Rock

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"I hate niggas! I hate em! I wish they'd let me join the Ku Klux Klan! Shit, I'd be doing a drive-by from here to Brooklyn!"

- Chris Rock

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"You know what they say, "There's no reason to ever hit a woman." Shit! There's a reason to hit everybody. You just don't do it. Shit, there's a reason to kick an old man down a flight of stairs. You just don't do it. Ain't nobody above an ass-whooping."

- Chris Rock

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"You know what GED stands for? Good Enough Diploma."

- Chris Rock

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"Yo, man. R&B sucks. I mean it's a couple of people that float, but, look, for the most part, the genre sucks. Just a bunch of people singing over rap beats. You don't like a rap record? Sing over it! Everybody talking them label. "Label this, label that!" Hey, Smokey Robinson wasn't singing about Motown! Look, the Isley Brothers wasn't going "T-Neck in the motherfuckin' house". The Jacksons were not singing about Epic because nobody gave a fuck!"

- Chris Rock

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"Hey, this is a joke that I wrote a long time ago. I actually, I really really, wrote this joke. [Following in reverse] So I'm walking down the street, right? And I saw this prostitute, right? And I said, 'How much?' She said, 'For $300, I'll do anything you want.' I said, 'Bitch, paint my house!'"

- Chris Rock

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"Yo, my first choice for the producer of this album was not Prince Paul. It was Roger Troutman and the group Zapp. Let's see how that would have sounded. (The following run through a Talk box): A black man boy said to a Cadillac dealer. And he's looking at some Cadillacs. And the dealer of Zohan says "are you thinking of buying a Cadillac?" And, he says, "No, I'm buying a Cadillac. I'm thinking of pussy... yeah!""

- Chris Rock

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"So, it's last Wednesday, right? I'm chilling' in my house in a pair of and getting ready to watch the game. You know what she had the nerve to say? Exactly! I thought the woman was crazy. But, then, you know what else she wanted me to do? So, I'm in my car, right? "Uh, Chris. I'm gonna tell you something." Nigga, what? You're wanted in 18 states and 2 territories! Nigga, what did you do? With a seal? How the hell you gonna do something like that with a seal? You know, that don't sound too bad. I'll try it with my woman. Like that? Get outta here! With oil? So, I'm dead! Just chilling' in Heaven! With my man Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Biggie, Tupac, Vanilla, my Bu2u, Sam Kinison and there's God. And I'm like, "God, you know everything. I can ask you one question. Who won the game?""

- Chris Rock

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"The Trenchcoat Mafia. "Nobody will play with us, we have no friends, we're the Trenchcoat Mafia." Hell, I saw the yearbook picture, it was six of 'em! I ain't have six friends in high school. I don't got six friends now! Shit, that's 3-on-3 with a half-court!"

- Chris Rock

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"Everybody want to know what the kids was listening to, what kind of music they was listening to, or what kind of movies they was watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching? Whatever happened to CRAZY?"

- Chris Rock

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"You don't need no gun control. You know what you need? We need some bullet control. We need to control the bullets! That's right. I think all bullets should cost $5,000. $5,000 for a bullet. You know why? Because if a bullet costs $5,000, there would be no more innocent bystanders. Every time somebody gets shot, people would be like, "Damn, he must've did something. Shit, they put $50,000 worth of bullets in his ass!" And people would think before they killed somebody if a bullet cost $5,000. "Man, I would blow your fucking head off ... if I could afford it! I'm gonna get me another job, I'm gonna start saving some money, and you're a dead man! You better hope I can't get no bullets on layaway!""

- Chris Rock

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"See, even if you get shot by a stray bullet, you won't have to go to no doctor to get it out, whoever shot you will take that bullet back! "I believe you got my property!""

- Chris Rock

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"I mean, they don't grade fathers. But if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up."

- Chris Rock

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"My favorite song right now is impossible to defend. It's impossible. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for liking this fucking song. Lil Jon. You know that shit: "To the window! To the wall! [crowd sings along] 'Till the sweat drip from my balls! Skeet, skeet, skeet, skeet!" You go to clubs, you see girls dance to that shit. "Till the sweat drip from my balls! Till the sweat drip from my balls! From my balls! From my balls! My balls! Skeet, Skeet Skeet!" I feel sorry for the guys that gotta pick a wife out of this bunch. It's like, "Daddy, where'd you meet Mommy?" "Oh, she was singing about balls at a club. Skeet, skeet, skeet!""

- Chris Rock

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"Daddy, can we talk?" "Hey, I'm watching the game!" "I'll show you! I'll dance naked to Mötley Crue records! I'm gonna change my name to Cina Buns and I'm gonna wear clear heels!" When did clear heels become the new whore uniform? When did that happen? Was there a big ho convention, and all the hoes got together and said, "We need something new! Something that just says nasty" And one girl said, "I got it! Clear heels!" "Ooh, girl, you disgusting!"

- Chris Rock

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"Women don't care, man. If the beat's all right, she will dance all night! I've seen girls on the floor dancing to the nastiest shit ever made. It's like, "Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick! &hellip; I put a dick in the ear, a dick in the ear! &hellip; Fuck her in the eye, fuck her in the eye! &hellip; Blind the bitch, blind the bitch, blind the bitch, blind the bitch with cum!""

- Chris Rock

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"If you mention to a woman that the song is disgusting and misogynistic, they all give you the same answer: "He ain't talking 'bout me!" Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick &hellip; He said your name! "No, he didn't!" Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick &hellip;"

- Chris Rock

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"You know those guys that go to the strip club at the daytime? If you're at a strip club and the sun is out, you got some problems!"

- Chris Rock

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"You know those guys that eat at the strip club? Eat the buffet? How the fuck could you eat in a nasty-ass strip club? What? Are you THAT hungry? Motherfucker, go to Mickey D's or some shit! Not even Rwandan refugees eat that shit! At a damn strip club! Titties and tater tots don't mix!"

- Chris Rock

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"You know the stripper myth? There's a stripper myth that's being perpetuated throughout society. The myth is, I'm strippin' to pay my tuition. No you're not! There's no strippers in college! There's no clear heels in biology! Shit, man, I didn't know they had a college that only took one-dollar bills. And if they got so many strippers at college, how come I never got a smart lap dance? I never got a girl that sat on my lap and said, If I was you, I would diversify my portfolio. You know, ever since the end of the Cold War, I find NATO obsolete!."

- Chris Rock

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"The government hates rap. That's why they don't arrest anybody that kills rappers! Only the good ones are dead, man! Only the good ones: Biggie dead, Tupac dead, Vanilla Ice still alive! They don't fill out a police report. They don't even have a chalk line when it's a dead rapper, they just take a piss around the body."

- Chris Rock

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"Hey, man don't let all this celebrity garbage fool you. It's all just a trick to get your mind...off...the...war. I think Bush sent that girl to Kobe's room. Bush sent that girl to Kobe's room, Bush sent that little boy to Michael Jackson's house. Bush killed Laci Peterson. Bush was fucking Paris Hilton in that video. All to get your mind off the war. Bush lied to me, they all lied to me: "We gotta go to Iraq because they're the most dangerous country on Earth. They're the most dangerous regime in the world." If they're so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fucking country? Shit, man, you couldn't take over Baltimore in two weeks."

- Chris Rock

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"White man makes guns. Big deal, nobody gives a fuck, kids shoot each other at school, nobody gives a fuck. White man makes guns? No problem. Black rapper says "guns"? Congressional hearing. "Oh, my God, that nigga said gun, and he rhymed it with fun"!"

- Chris Rock

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"Are we so desperate for entertainment that we will fall for a trickless magician?? Where the fuck's the trick? Saw a woman in half. Pull a rabbit out of a hat. Do something! What tricks does this guy have? "I'm in a box...and I ain't gonna eat". "I'm in a box...and I ain't gonna eat"!! That ain't no trick! That's called living in the projects!"

- Chris Rock

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"Ed Bradley looked at Michael Jackson like he wanted to say, "Nigga, is you crazy?" Like he wanted to take the 60 Minutes clock and push the shit forward to say, "Nigga, what the fuck is wrong with you?" "I thought you said it was 60 minutes &hellip;" "It's 10 minutes, get outta here! You nutty nigga, what the fuck is wrong with you?""

- Chris Rock

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"Black people dominate every physical activity in the United States of America. We're only 10% of the population, we're 90% of the Final Four. Okay? We fucking dominate all this shit! Okay? Basketball, baseball, football, boxing, track- even golf and tennis! And as soon they make a heated hockey rink, we're gonna take that shit, too. Motherfuck Wayne Gretzky. Wait 'till you see LeBron on some skates. You ain't seen shit yet! He just gonna have one skate, chilling. "What's up?" He won't even have a stick, he'll just smack the puck in with his dick. Pow! "Slapshot, bee-otch!""

- Chris Rock

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"That tiger ain't go crazy; that tiger went tiger! You know when he was really crazy? When he was riding around on a unicycle with a Hitler helmet on! "Oh, shit! I'm a crazy tiger!""

- Chris Rock

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"A black C student can't do shit with his life. A black C student can't be a manager at Burger King. Meanwhile, a white C student just happens to be the President of the United States."

- Chris Rock

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"Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!"

- Chris Rock

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"R. Kelly's got a lot of balls. Talking about "it ain't me." Got a damn sex tape out; "it ain't me." Motherfucker, we know what you look like. That's you, okay? There's a damn Soul Train award right next to the bed."

- Chris Rock

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"What is on Kobe's mind? Going to Colorado, around all these white people, and not bringing Johnnie Cochran? Well then they say, "well if you hire Johnnie Cochran, you're going to look guilty." Yeah, but you going home! You want to look innocent in jail? I'd rather look guilty at the mall."

- Chris Rock

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"It's hard to defend "I've got hoes in different area codes". It's hard to defend "move, bitch, get out the way!" It's hard to break it down intellectually &hellip; "Well, as you can see, there's a bitch in his way, that he needs to move. Thus the term, "move, bitch, get out the way". You need to open your eyes so you can get the bitches out of your way!""

- Chris Rock

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"You know the only thing you can do to stop your man from cheating? The only thing you can do &hellip; is be there. Where? There! Wherever he's thinking about fucking, that's it. Just be right there. And even then he still might lose your ass. He's like, "Honey, look! A Sale! Let me go fuck this bitch right now!""

- Chris Rock

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"If you wanna get away with murder, all you gotta do is shoot somebody in the head and put a demo tape in their pocket! "This is a rap killing. Let's go home!""

- Chris Rock

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"Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang. "I'm conservative", "I'm liberal", "I'm conservative". Bullshit! Be a fucking person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, okay? I've got some shit I'm conservative about, I've got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!"

- Chris Rock

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"Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check &hellip; is wealthy. "Ah, here you go, Shaq. Go buy yourself a bouncing car. Bling, bling!""

- Chris Rock

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"You know the beautiful thing about the gay marriage issue? It's the absolute only issue that the President will answer. The President don't give a fuck. He will give you a straight answer on gay marriage. "Uh, Mr. President, what about the war? When's it gonna end?" "Well, you never know. We're talking to people, and we're looking for stuff, and we might find it, we might not, and it's out there, we're gonna get it, you never know. How's it going? Yeah!" "Uh, Mr. President, what about the economy, when's it gonna pick up?" "Well, you never know, we're talking to people, and economic indicators indicate that indications are coming to the indicator. You know what I'm saying? All right!" "Uh, Mr. President, what about gay marriage?" "Fuck them faggots!""

- Chris Rock

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"You can be married and bored, or single and lonely. Ain't no happiness nowhere."

- Chris Rock

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"If you haven't contemplated murder, you ain't been in love. If you haven't seriously thought about killing a motherfucker, you ain't been in love. If you haven't had a can of rat poison in your hand and looked at it for forty-five minutes straight, you ain't been in love. If you haven't bought a shovel and a bag and a rug to roll their ass up in, you ain't been in love. If you haven't practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, you ain't been in love. And the only thing that's stopped you from killing this motherfucker was a episode of CSI: "Oh man, they thorough. I better make up. They might catch my ass.""

- Chris Rock

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"See... Relationships are hard, man. For order, for any relationship to work, both people have to be on the same page, both people have to have the same focus, and we all know what that page is. We all know what that focus is. In order for the relationship to work both people have to have the same focus, and what's that focus? That focus is all about HER! It's all about her!"

- Chris Rock

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"Fellas, when you wake up in the morning, you should look yourself in the mirror and say, "FUCK YOU! Fuck your hopes, fuck your dreams, fuck your plans &hellip; fuck everything you thought this life was going to bring to you. Now let's go out there and try to make this bitch happy.""

- Chris Rock

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"Women hate women. You get any two girlfriends in this room, been girlfriends for twenty five years, you put a man in between them &hellip; "fuck that bitch," "fuck that bitch." Guys are not like that. Guys actually think that there are other fish in the sea, and if a guy introduces his boy to his new girlfriend, and when they walk away, his boy goes, "Oh man, she's nice, I gotta get me a girl like that." If a woman introduces her new man to her girlfriend, and they walk away, her girlfriend goes, "I gotta get him, and I will slit that bitch's throat to do it." Every girl in here got a girlfriend they don't trust around their man."

- Chris Rock

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"But here's what they don't tell you. You can never make a woman happy, it's impossible. I've never met a happy woman in my life. They're always complaining about something. You can fuck a woman with a diamond dick and make her come ten times, and she'll still complain. "Why did you make me come so hard? This diamond dick is cloudy, why didn't you go to Tiffany's? You're so fucking cheap.""

- Chris Rock

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"What's in the tea?" "Water, bitch!"

- Chris Rock

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"Whenever I go out with other married couples, I like to bring along a single crackhead. Just to spice things up."

- Chris Rock

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"Even if you meet the perfect person, it ain't gonna be at the perfect time. You're married, they're single. That's right. You're Jewish, they're Palestinian. You're a Mexican, they're a raccoon. You're a black woman, he's a black man."

- Chris Rock

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"God will send you a double date with the perfect couple. Have you ever made the mistake of going on a double date with the perfect couple? You're in the middle of your bullshit relationship and you actually sit down with two people that are actually in love. You can't even eat your food cause you can't believe what the fuck you are witnessing. You got a fork in your hand like, "Oh shit! He's really listening to what she's got to say! Wow! They really like being around each other! Man, we can't hang with them no more, they gonna break us up. Can't let these happy motherfuckers fuck up my life!""

- Chris Rock

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"So if you're black or brown, you can make money in America, you can get rich in America &hellip; but whatever you decide to do, it better be positive, 'cause if one person is harmed, you will be destroyed. You see Oprah, she just be giving away money. She's trying keep the Feds off her back."

- Chris Rock

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"We can't have gay marriage 'cause marriage is sacred, it happens in the church. Marriage is sacred, it's sacred. No, it's not, not in America, not in a country that watches Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? and The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and Who Wants to Marry a Midget. Get the fuck outta here. Shit, Michael Jackson got married, how fucking sacred is that shit?"

- Chris Rock

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"White man makes alcohol. Tastes great, I love it, you love it, we all love it. Kills motherfuckers every single day. Okay? Some of y'all ain't even make it home tonight 'cause of alcohol. You'll be like, "Oh man, that Chris Rock sure is funny, oh! Shit!" But it's all right 'cause it's all white. White man makes Cigarettes, the most dangerous product known to man. Cigarettes are so fucking dangerous it kills motherfuckers that don't smoke, okay? That's how fucking dangerous cigarettes are, okay? Yes, first hand smoke, second hand smoke. People talking out of their necks into a machine like, "Hey, what's up, man, I love cigarettes." But it's all right 'cause it's all white. Could you imagine if the Philip Morris family was a bunch of jheri-curled niggas from Mississippi? Do you know how illegal a pack of cigarettes would be? You would get fifty years just for a carton of Newports. Shit. But it's all right, 'cause it's all white."

- Chris Rock

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"So think about the poor slave who could read, but was scared to teach their kids to read for fear they would be killing their kids. Think about the poor slave that rode to town every week. Think about the poor slave who rode the buggy to town every week. Riding the buggy &hellip; riding the buggy, and he could read, and is riding the buggy and he's riding the buggy. And up ahead he sees a busy intersection, and is riding the buggy and he's riding the buggy. Then he sees a STOP sign &hellip; Now he's in a big dilemma. "If I go through this intersection, I'm a have a accident. If I stop, these crackers will kill me." And he's riding the buggy, and in the last minute he says "fuck it", goes through the intersection, has a big ol' accident. Almost kills somebody. Then the police come: "Nigga, what is wrong with you? Nigga, what the fuck is wrong with you? You could have killed somebody, nigga. Didn't see that stop sign?" "Oh, I don't know what you talking about, sir." "You didn't see that stop sign, that stop sign back there?" "Oh, you mean that octagon thing." "Nigga, who taught you octagon?""

- Chris Rock

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"It's beautiful that abortion is legal in America. I love going to abortion rallies to pick up women, 'cause you know they're fucking. You ain't gonna find a bunch of virgins at the abortion rally. You might even see some clear heels!"

- Chris Rock

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"Oh the abortion issue, it's a woman's issue. When a woman get pregnant, she don't want to hear shit from the man. Fuck you, motherfuck you, I don't need you. Unless she decides to have the baby and she's like, "Where my check?""

- Chris Rock

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"When a woman get pregnant, it's an issue between her and her girlfriends. When a woman get pregnant, her and her girlfriends form an abortion tribunal, and they vote on the child like it was Survivor. Then the first girlfriend throws in her two cents: "Child, you should have that baby, that man got some good hair, it's wavy, it's wavy." Then second girlfriend throws in her two cents: "Girl, why are we even talking about this? Ain't we supposed to go to Cancun next weekend? Get rid of that baby." And that's how life is decided in America."

- Chris Rock

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"The number one reason people hate America: the number one reason is because of our religion. Americans worship money, we worship money. Separate God from school, separate God from work, separate God from government, but on your money it says in God we trust. All my life I've been looking for God, and He's right in my pocket. Americans worship money, and we all go to the same church, the church of ATM. Everywhere you look there's a new branch popping up &hellip; remind you about how much money you got and how much money you don't got. And if you got less than twenty dollars, the machine won't even talk to you. The machine is like, "You better go see a teller." You ever go to a teller and try to take out eight dollars and fifty cents? Oh, it's disgusting &hellip; oh man, you gotta wait on that long ass line, people doing real transactions in front of you, you get on to the fucking front, you fill out your form, eight fifty. The fucking teller looks at it, she look at you, she looks at the check, she don't even take the money out of the drawer, she take it out of her pocket, "Here you go, get outta here." And here's something, man. Drugs are illegal, but ATM machines are open twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-four hours a day. For who? Who the fuck is it open for? Have you ever taken out three hundred dollars at four o'clock in the morning for something positive? Shit, when you press that machine at four o'clock in the morning, I think a psychiatrist should pop up on the screen and go, "Come on, man, save your money, man. Don't buy drugs, buy some rims. They spinning, nigga, they spinning, they spinning, nigga, they spinning." Americans worship money. Shit, you know why banks are closed on Sunday? 'Cause if they wasn't, church would be empty."

- Chris Rock

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"Is it just me, or is he the greasiest nigga you ever seen in your life? Every time Jermaine comes on, I gotta wipe the grease off the screen! Can't see shit! Jermaine must have been on. Even the police can't catch his ass, 'cause every time they try, he just slips out! They be like, "Somebody throw some sand on that nigga! Please!""

- Chris Rock

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"Shit, every woman in here got a girlfriend they don't trust around their man. A good girlfriend too, it's like, "Yeah, I'll go shopping with her, but I ain't gonna leave that bitch alone with my man for five minutes, no." I remember one time, I was at a restaurant with me, my wife, and her girlfriend. And my wife gets up and goes, "Honey, I'm going to the bathroom." And I'm like, "All right, honey, I'll see you when you get back." And she goes, "No, you coming with me!" She made me come with her to the bathroom! And she did the right thing, 'cause I'd have fucked the girl; I'da fucked her. I'd have fucked her on a damn quesadilla, I didn't give a fuck."

- Chris Rock

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"Oprah is rich, Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out a fuckin' window and slit his throat on the way down saying, "I can't even put gas in my plane!""

- Chris Rock

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"[In deep voice] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to WLOW, Low Radio. Now a lot of rappers out there would like to tell the girls to get low, but tonight we're gonna tell you to get lower. That's right! In the ground, under the ground! Get in the mud, bitch! Dig to China, hoe! I don't even know why the fuck you are standing! It's time for you to get lower! Now some of you bitches are still standing, and I don't understand that, 'cuz I want y'all to get low! I'm talking REAL low! I want you so low that you can change an ant's transmission! I want you so low that Aquaman says "Bitch, what the fuck are you doing under the ocean!?""

- Chris Rock

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"Hey, man, fuck y'all! I ain't telling you motherfuckers shit! You motherfuckers can suck my dick! I don't know what the fuck you talking about! Let me get the fuck out of this motherfucker, 'cuz I got shit to do, bitch!"

- Chris Rock

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"I don't give a fuck! So, what!? Motherfuck the tiger! I'd be shot in the tooth, motherfucker! I don't give a fuck about your bee-otches!"

- Chris Rock

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"Who'd... you think I'd give a fuck!? I don't give a fuck about no motherfucking chainsaw! I got two black wives, motherfucker! Fuck y'all!"

- Chris Rock

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"You mean to tell me that Jamaicans invented sugar, reggae and the best drug on Earth and the white man makes all the money!?"

- Chris Rock

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"You mean to tell me that Hawaiians came up with pineapples, resorts, hula hoops, Magnum P.I. and the best damn punch in the world and they don't get no money from it!?"

- Chris Rock

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"You mean to tell me that for the last sixty years, the white man's been traveling to outer space, murdering Martians, telling us there's no life up there, building casinos and resorts while he fucks some of the finest bitches in the galaxy, and niggas just want rims!?"

- Chris Rock

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"George Bush has fucked up so bad, he made it hard for a white man to run for president! People are like "give me a black man, a white woman, a giraffe, a zebra...anything but another white man! That last one fucked up my roof!""

- Chris Rock

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"[on John McCain] I don't need a president with a bucket list!"

- Chris Rock

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"[on John McCain being too old] When you die at 72, no matter what you die of, it's natural causes. Even if you get hit by a truck, it's natural causes. 'Cause if you was younger, you'd have got out the way!"

- Chris Rock

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"[on John McCain being in a POW camp] I don't wanna vote for nobody who got captured, I wanna vote for the motherfucker that got away!"

- Chris Rock

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"[in South Africa] Barack Obama! A black man! With a black name! I know that ain't that black here, but in America that's about as black as a name could get. Barack Obama! That's right next to Dikembe Mutombo. That's right. Barack, man, he don't let his blackness sneak up on you. Y'know, if his name was Bob Jones or something, it might take you two or three weeks to realize he black. But as soon as you hear "Barack Obama"...you expect to see a brother with a spear! Just standin' on top of a dead lion! Barack Obama! You expect to see the bass player from the Commodores come out! [sings and mimes playing bass] "Too hot ta trot, now, baby, too hot ta trot, bay-by!" I'm not talkin' about Lionel Richie, I'm talkin' about them shiny niggas behind him!"

- Chris Rock

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"[about Obama] We're not just voting for him 'cause he's black, we're voting for him 'cause he's black and qualified. That's why we're voting for the motherfucker. Yeah. That's why we behind him. It's not like we're voting for Flavor Flav. "Yeeeeah, boooooy! Flavor Flaaaav!" Hey, I love Flavor. Lovin' him for 20 years. I love the "Flavor of Love" show; I think it's quite entertainin'. But Flavor Flav must be killed. In order for black people to truly reach the promised land, Flavor Flav has to be shot. These are important times! We got a black man runnin' for President! We don't need a nigger runnin' around with a fuckin' clock around his neck and a Viking hat on his head! "Not this year, Flav, put a suit on! Nigga, put a suit on!""

- Chris Rock

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"Yo, it's gonna be hard for Barack Obama to be President, 'cause Barack Obama has to overcome a handicap that the other candidate does not have to overcome. That's right. It's gonna be hard for Barack Obama to be President because Barack Obama has...a black wife. And I don't think a black lady can be First Lady of the United States. Yeah, I said it. I said it in Johannesburg, I said it! [cuts to London] I said it in London, England, I said that shit! [cuts to New York] I said it at the Apollo Theatre, I said that shit! I don't believe a black woman could be First Lady, 'cause you know why? Because a black woman cannot play the background of a relationship! [some women boo] Don't get me wrong, a black woman could be President with no problem. First Lady--too much shuttin' up in that job. Can you imagine tellin' your black wife that you President? "Honey, I won, I'm President!" "No, we President! And I want my girlfriends in the cabinet! I want Kiki to be Secretary of Defense! She can fight, she can fight.""

- Chris Rock

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"George Bush is still in charge. And nobody gives less of a fuck than George Bush. You think you don't give a fuck? Bush don't give a fuck. Nobody gives less of a fuck than George Bush. If you was hangin' from a cliff, gettin' ready to fall to your death--that's right--and Bush was at the top of the cliff, and all you needed was a fuck to save your life, and Bush had a pocket full of fucks...he wouldn't give you one. "Hey, Bush, I need a fuck!" "Ohh, you know I don't give a fuck. Here's a fuck...psych!""

- Chris Rock

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"I will give you an example of how race affects my life. I live in a place called Alpine, New Jersey. Live in Alpine, New Jersey, right? My house costs millions of dollars. [some whistles and cheers from the audience] Don't hate the player, hate the game. In my neighborhood, there are four black people. Hundreds of houses, four black people. Who are these black people? Well, there's me, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z and Eddie Murphy. Only black people in the whole neighborhood. So let's break it down, let's break it down: me, I'm a decent comedian. I'm a'ight. [applause] Mary J. Blige, one of the greatest R&B singers to ever walk the Earth. Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers to ever live. Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest actors to ever, ever do it. Do you know what the white man who lives next door to me does for a living? He's a fucking dentist! He ain't the best dentist in the world...he ain't going to the dental hall of fame...he don't get plaques for getting rid of plaque. He's just a yank-your-tooth-out dentist. See, the black man gotta fly to get to somethin' the white man can walk to."

- Chris Rock

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"There's nothin' a white person could ever say to me that will ever catch me off-guard. Ever! I'm always lookin' for some racism! No matter where the fuck I'm at, I'm like "where the racism at? Where it at, where it at, where it at?" No matter where I'm at. I could be sittin' down with Regis Philbin, doin' an interview, talkin' about Madagascar 2, sayin' "yeah, Regis, Madagascar 2's real good, man. I play a zebra again! Oh, this motherfucker's great!" And right in the middle of the interview, Regis'll pull a pencil out of his pocket, stab me in the neck and say "take that, ya fuckin' nigger! Take that, ya dirty, greasy nigger! Take that, ya fuckin' nigger!" And I'd be like "I shoulda seen it comin'. I let Regis get too close." I'll be mad at me. I'll apologize--"hey, man, I left my neck all out, man. I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry.""

- Chris Rock

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"[on Isaiah Washington being fired] What if the person that he called a faggot...was acting like a faggot? You don't have to be gay to act like a faggot. You don't even have to be a man to act like a faggot. Anybody can act like a faggot. Let me give you an example: I love Gwen Stefani. I think No Doubt is one of the best groups in the world; I keep a No Doubt CD in my car and I sing that shit to the end. I'm like "don't speak, I know just what you're sayin', oh, please stop explainin'"...I won't even get out my car 'til the shit's over. I'm like "you know you're good, you know you're real good...la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la, [high pitched] Don't! Don't!" I fuckin' love me some Gwen Stefani! Now, if I'm drivin' my car, and I'm at the light, and you in the car behind me, and the light's red, and I'm just sittin' there blasting some Gwen Stefani and I'm like "ain't no hollaback girl! Ain't no hollaback girl! Ain't no hollaback!" And you in the car behind me and the light's red--cool. But then the light turns green. And I don't see it, because I'm in Gwen Stefani heaven. And I'm just goin' "Ain't no hollaback girl! Ain't no hollaback girl! Ain't no hollaback!" Now the light starts fuckin' blinking! It's gettin' ready to turn red again, and I *still* don't see it, and I'm in my car going "This shit is bananas! B-na-na-na-nas! This shit is bananas! B-na-na-na-nas!" Now if you in the car behind me, and that light's gettin' ready to turn red, and I'm going "this shit is bananas! B-na-na-na-nas!" If you in the car behind me, you have the right to go "HEY, FAGGOT! The light's about to change!" Shit, even Elton John would call me a faggot at that moment. It's not the word, it's the context in which the word is bein' said!"

- Chris Rock

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"Shit, last year the NAACP had a funeral for the word "nigger"! Well, tonight is Easter!"

- Chris Rock

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"So the question is, can white people say "nigger"? And the answer's the same: "Not really." Oh there's some exceptions like, "Fuck me harder, nigger!" Lot of white women trying not to laugh in front of their husbands right now. "Honey I was in college! I had to see what it was about! He made me say it!""

- Chris Rock

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"But the question remains the same: Can white people say "nigger"? And the answer's the same: not really. But wait a minute, there's one exception. There's one exception. There's one instance where white people can say nigger. And I'ma let it out tonight. I'ma let it out here in Johannesburg. The one time that white people can say nigger. White people are like "this is what I paid for! It's a fuckin' great night now!" The one time white people can say nigger: here it goes; listen closely. 'Cause I may never say this shit again. The one time white people can say nigger, OK: if it's Christmas Eve, and it's between 4:30 and 4:49 in the morning. If you white, and you're on your way to Toys 'R' Us to get your kid the last Transformer doll, and right before you walk into Toys 'R' Us, some black person runs up beside you, smacks you in the head with a brick, knocks you to the ground, stomps on your face--"take that, you cracker-ass motherfucker!" Riverdances on your head--"take that, you cracker-ass motherfucker!" Takes your money, pisses on you, and runs away--if you white, at that moment, you can say "Somebody stop that nigger!" Matter of fact, if you white and that happens to you, you can say nigger for a whole month! But you gotta walk around with the police report in your pocket. In case any black people catch you sayin' nigger, the police report will act as your freedom papers. "Hey, I heard you saying nigger; let me see your fuckin' papers. Gimme the papers; show me the papers!" [pretends to read a sheet] "Christmas Eve! 4:48! You just made it, motherfucker! Pissed on you! ...I hope they catch that nigger!""

- Chris Rock

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"On Desperate Housewives: I think they should change the name of that show from Desperate Housewives...to Ungrateful Bitches! You all are hoes bitch!"

- Chris Rock

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"I try never to brag but I'm probably the only person who has been on 60 Minutes twice and isn't dead."

- Chris Rock

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"I love going to the Cellar and spanking the shit out of everybody. I love going there, at my age, and having an act that's better than the guys who are fifteen or twenty years younger than me. I'm like "This is my seventh special. What's your fucking excuse?""

- Chris Rock

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"You learn more from fucking up than you do from success, unfortunately. And failure, if you don't let it defeat you, is what fuels your future success."

- Chris Rock

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"Chris Rock is not only the best comedian in the world, he is WAY better than everyone else. Period."

- Chris Rock

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"Comedian Chris Rock recently came out about being on the Autism spectrum; specifically, he was diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disorder. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he describes how clear-cut indicators (such as an inability to pick up on social cues and a tendency to take all statements hyperliterally) were ignored until his mid-fifties. Because he was an outgoing, Black comedian, Autism seemed unthinkable as an explanation for the social and emotional challenges he was facing. Rock says he downplayed his own mental health needs, too, because he'd internalized the idea only white people go to therapy."

- Chris Rock

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"Chris Rock might be the only comedian I know who's maybe a little better at analogies than I am. He's a great analogizer."

- Chris Rock

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"Faith is a beautiful thing. So are forest fires, and the color of gangrene. I think faith—especially capital-F Faith—is more dangerous and more disgusting than either. It is a substitute for thought."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud. The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud. Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"It means "Ask the next question." Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created. This guy is sitting in a cave and he says, "Why can't man fly?" Well, that's the question. The answer may not help him, but the question now has been asked. The next question is what? How? And so all through the ages, people have been trying to find out the answer to that question. We've found the answer, and we do fly. This is true of every accomplishment, whether it's technology or literature, poetry, political systems or anything else. That is it. Ask the next question. And the one after that."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"It's the simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"That Heel. That lousy wart on the nose of progress."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"In its shelter they developed a weapon. What is was we shall never know, and our race will live—or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field, for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"And those he met who had been hurt by war and who still hated the late enemy—those who would have been happy to go back and kill some more, reckoning vital risk well worth it—those he considered mad, and forgot them."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I have been curious about how much personal motive you had for your work. I think that answers it pretty well. I think, too, that you believe what you are saying. Do you know that people who do things for impersonal motives are as rare as fur on a fish?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Show me a nagging woman and I’ll show you one who hasn’t enough to worry about."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"“Metallurgy! A girl like you mucking about with molybs and durals instead of heartbeats and hope chests!” “Mother, sweetheart, hasn’t occurred to you at all that I don’t want to get married? Not yet, anyway.” “Of course it has. That doesn’t alter the fact that a woman is only forty percent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty percent a woman until she has children. As for you and your precious career, I seem to remember something about a certain Marie Sklodowska who didn’t mind marrying a fellow called Curie, science or no science.”"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"“Oh well. Chacun à son goût, as they say, which means—” And she stopped me. “Please. Don’t translate. It couldn’t be phrased as well in English.” I had been about to say “—which means Jack’s son has the gout.”"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Half of humanity doesn’t know what it wants or how to find out. The other half knows what it wants, hasn’t got it, and is going crazy trying to convince itself that it already has it."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I remember wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person is close to the dream. But it’s a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You unload the person, and the dream stays with you."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"“God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and … and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew — not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I wouldn’t give you sand if I met you on the beach."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"This country has music through its blood and bones like a disease, and a man cannot draw in a breath of air that isn’t a-thrum with it."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"A man with talent eats, sweats, and cares for his children like any other. And if talent is a natural thing, remember that water is also, and fire, and wind; therefore flood and holocaust and hurricane are as natural as talent, and can consume and destroy you."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Love, Caroline, isn’t…that. Love is everything else that can be between a man and a woman, without that."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"There are always many ways to accomplish anything, but only one of them is really best. Which of them is best—that is the source of all argument on the production of anything, the creator of factions among the designers, and the first enemy of speed and efficiency."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"There were a lot of people living in his time who never did latch on to the idea that the curve of technological progress was not a flat slanting line like a diving board, but a geometrical curve like a ski-jump. These wistful and mixed-up souls were always suffering from attacks of belated conservatism, clutching suddenly at this dying thing and that, trying to keep it or bring it back. It wasn’t real conservatism at all, of course, but an unthought longing for the dear old days when one could predict what would be there tomorrow, if not next week. Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"You have questions—urgent questions—I know that. And what makes them urgent is that you have in your mind the answers you want to hear. You will be more and more angry if you do not get those answers, but some can’t be given as you would hear them, because they would not be true."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"And Charlie asked questions! His unease had long since disappeared, and two of his most deep-dyed characteristics took over: one, the result of his omnivorous, undisciplined, indefatigable reading and picking of brains; second, the great gaping holes this had left in his considerable body of knowledge. Both appeared far more drastic than he had heretofore known; he knew ever so much more than he knew he knew, and he had between five and seven times as much misinformation and ignorance than he had ever dreamed."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"As Adam said when his wife fell out of the tree—Eve’s dropping again."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"“Now how can you like a man without wanting him?” she demands of herself aloud. There is no answer. It is an article of faith with her. If you like a man, it has to be because you want him. Whoever heard of it any other way?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Mankind has in it a crushing need to feel superior. This doesn’t have to bother the very small minority who actually are superior, but it sure troubles the controlling majority who are not. If you can’t be really good at anything, then the only way to be able to prove you are superior is to make someone else inferior. It is this rampaging need in humanity which has, since pre-history, driven a man to stand on the neck of his neighbor, a nation to enslave another, a race to tread on a race. But it is also what men have done to women. Did they actually find them inferior to begin with, and learn from that to try to feel superior to other things outside—other races, religions, nationalities, occupations? Or was it the other way around: did men make women inferior for the same reason they tried to dominate the outsider? Which is cause, which effect?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"A pig among people is a pig, he tells himself, but a pig among pigs is people."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"You cannot be objective about this because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which the maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of their difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"So it is easily seen that the sexual insignes are nothing in themselves, for any of them, in another time and place, might belong to both sexes, the other sex, or neither. In other words, a skirt does not make the social entity, woman. It takes a skirt plus a social attitude to do it. But all through history, in virtually every culture and country, there has indeed been a “woman’s province” and a “man’s province,” and in most cases the differences between them have been exploited to fantastic, sometimes sickening extremes. Why?"

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"There is in mankind a deep and desperate necessity to feel superior. In any group there are some who genuinely are superior...but it is easy to see that within the parameters of any group, be it culture, club, nation, profession, only a few are really superior; the mass, clearly, are not. But it is the will of the mass that dictates the mores, initiated though changes may be by individuals or minorities; the individuals or minorities, more often than not, are cut down for their trouble. And if a unit of the mass wants to feel superior, it will find a way. This terrible drive has found expression in many ways, through history—in slavery and genocide, xenophobia and snobbery, race prejudice and sex differentiation. Given a man who, among his fellows, has no real superiority, you are faced with a bedevilled madman who, if superiority is denied him, and he cannot learn one or earn one, will turn on something weaker than himself and make it inferior. The obvious, logical, handiest subject for this inexcusable indignity is his woman. He could not do this to anyone he loved."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Pleasure, the outer edge of ecstasy, was in the dour days of Protestantism, considered sinful in itself, wherever gained; Rome held specifically that any or all sexual pleasure was sinful. And for all this capped volcano produced in terms of bridges and houses, factories and bombs, it gouted from its riven sides a frightful harvest of neurosis. And even where a nation officially discarded the church, the same repressive techniques remained, the same preoccupation with doctrine, filtered through the same mesh of guilt. So sex and religion, the real meaning of human existence, ceased to be meaning and became means; the unbridgeable hostility between the final combatants was the proof of the identity of their aim—the total domination, for the ultimate satisfaction of the will to superiority, of all human minds."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality. Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government—one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless—a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I liked his work because he was such a good craftsman. Sometimes science fiction writers were more pulp writers than they had to be because they didn't bother to learn. I'm talking about the old-time science fiction writers now, the ones who were more concerned with the wonderful machine than with the people who were supposed to be having something to do with the machine. They didn't characterize very well. Their women characters in particular were stick people, puppets, and Sturgeon, even though he was easily old enough to be my father, didn't write that way, and a few others didn't write that way. I especially paid attention to their writings... By the way, I don't believe that Sturgeon ever graduated from high school. He made a comment when he was teaching the class, an extension course: he said probably America is the only country where a man who never graduated from high school can teach at college. He might have had a point."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Theodore Sturgeon was a well-known science fiction writer. He's dead now, but supposedly he was on a panel at a science fiction convention once when somebody complained to him, "Ted, 90 percent of science fiction is shit." Sturgeon said, "Ninety percent of everything is shit.""

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"Theodore Sturgeon influenced me-he was a real craftsman. I probably liked The Synthetic Man, which was originally called The Dreaming Jewels, and More Than Human, the best. The writers who influenced me most tended to be those who were the most prolific."

- Theodore Sturgeon

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"I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"At the time I wrote Methuselah’s Children I was still politically quite naive and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes… It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws. I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way government sticks its nose in everything, now."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I think that describes me, too — still a democrat not because I love the Common People and not because I think democracy is so successful (look around you) but, because in a lifetime of thinking about it and learning all that I could, I haven't found any other political organization that worked as well. As for libertarian, I've been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term "philosophical anarchist" or "autarchist" about me, but "libertarian" is easier to define and fits well enough."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I started clipping and filing by categories on trends as early as 1930 and my "youngest" file was started in 1945. Span of time is important; the 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup — if any."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"My wife Ticky is an anarchist-individualist ... When she was in the Navy during the early 'forties she showed up one morning in proper uniform but with her red hair held down by a simple navy-blue band — a hair ribbon. It was neat (Ticky is always neat) and it suited the rest of her outfit esthetically, but it was undeniably a hair ribbon and her division officer had fits. "If you can show me," Ticky answered with simple dignity, "where it says one word in the Navy Uniform Regulations on the subject of hair ribbons, I'll take it off. Otherwise not." See what I mean? She doesn't have the right attitude."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He seeks order, not truth. Suppose truth defies order, will he accept it? Will you? I think not."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He decided to stay in his space suit; explosive decompression didn’t appeal to him. Come to think about it, death from old age was his choice."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"High I.Q., good compatibility index, superior education—everything that makes a person pleasant and easy and interesting to have around."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"History is never surprising—after it happens."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don’t pay any attention to what she says. Half of it’s always wrong and she doesn’t mean the rest."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I was too busy to oblige them by dying just now."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Just now I’m writing a series of oh-so-respectful articles about the private life of the Prophet and his acolytes and attending priests, how many servants they have, how much it costs to run the Palace, all about the fancy ceremonies and rituals, and such junk. All of it perfectly true, of course, and told with unctuous approval. But I lay it on a shade too thick. The emphasis is on the jewels and the solid gold trappings and how much it all costs, and I keep telling the yokels what a privilege it is for them to be permitted to pay for such frippery and how flattered they should feel that God’s representative on earth lets them take care of him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Do you seriously expect to start a rebellion with picayune stuff like that?” “It’s not picayune stuff, because it acts directly on their emotions, below the logical level. You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. It doesn’t have to be a prejudice about an important matter either."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It’s just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are ‘inspired.’ Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"First they junked the concept of “justice.” Examined semantically “justice” has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, “This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any “noises” said about it will only add to confusion. But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What course of action do you favor?” “Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that ‘truth will prevail’ is merely a pious wish; history doesn’t show it.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Yes, maybe it’s just one colossal big joke with no point to it.” Lazarus stood up and stretched and scratched his ribs. “But I can tell you this, Andy, whatever the answers are, here’s one monkey that’s going to keep on climbing, and looking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The answer to any question starting, “Why don’t they—” is almost always, “Money.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"That’s all there is, really, to the scientific method: to be able to distinguish fact from non-facts."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery—and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone—no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can’t save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Under the Communist system it is never possible to get the facts. The truth is dead—murdered—and the official version, the pravda, is that which advances the world Communist revolution."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I simply know that when the government controls every word that is printed, every idea that is taught in school, history is no longer a record of the past but is a changeable thing, whatever is convenient to the government."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A man who learns to read and write is half-way to freedom by that one fact."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"So note the twentieth century down as a century of tragedy and war and death—but also please note that it is the century in which the human race finally learned to read and write. More people will learn to read and write in the next forty years than in all the thousands of years in history. I firmly predict that this will be the most important historical fact about this, our century."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Creativity truly cannot be divided. Every film which turns out to be an artistic success (most of them are not, as we all know too well) is invariably the creation of one man—usually the director, often the producer, once in a blue moon the writer. Creative art is never produced by the committee system. Never. Even when it may seem so from outside, even when others, perhaps thousands of others, take part in the work, it is always the genius of one man. In building a cathedral, it is the architect—not the stone cutters."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I don’t believe he would have conceded that he had five fingers on his right hand without an auditor to back him up."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“We must make the fee contingent on results.” “Did you ever hear of anyone in his right mind dealing with a wizard on any other basis?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We white men in this country are inclined to underestimate the black man—I know I do—because we see him out of his cultural matrix. Those we know have had their own culture wrenched from them some generations back and a servile pseudo culture imposed on them by force. We forget that the black man has a culture of his own, older than ours and more solidly grounded, based on character and the power of the mind rather than the cheap, ephemeral tricks of mechanical gadgets. But it is a stern, fierce culture with no sentimental concern for the weak and the unfit, and it never quite dies out."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He couldn’t be wrong, basically, yet the doctor had certainly pointed out logical holes in his position. From a logical standpoint the whole world might be a fraud perpetrated on everybody. But logic meant nothing—logic itself was a fraud, starting with unproved assumptions incapable of proving anything. The world is what it is!—And carries its own evidence of trickery. But does it? What did he have to go on? Could he lay down the line between known facts and everything else and then make a reasonable interpretation of the world, based on facts alone—an interpretation free from complexities of logic and no hidden assumptions of points not certain. Very well— First fact, himself. He knew himself directly. He existed. Second facts, the evidence of his “five senses,” everything that he himself saw and heard and smelled and tasted with his physical senses. Subject to their limitations, he must believe his senses. Without them he was entirely solitary, shut up in a locker of bone, blind, deaf, cut off, the only being in the world. And that was not the case. He knew that he did not invent the information brought to him by his senses. There had to be something else out there, some otherness that produced the things his senses recorded. All philosophies that claimed that the physical world around him did not exist except in his imagination were sheer nonsense. But beyond that, what? Were there any third facts on which he could rely? No, not at this point. He could not afford to believe anything that he was told, or that he read, or that was implicitly assumed to be true about the world around him. No, he could not believe any of it, for the sum total of what he had been told and read and been taught in school was so contradictory, so senseless, so wildly insane that none of it could be believed unless he personally confirmed it. Wait a minute—The very telling of these lies, these senseless contradictions, was a fact in itself, known to him directly. To that extent they were data, probably very important data. The world as it had been shown to him was a piece of unreason, an idiot’s dream. Yet it was on too mammoth a scale to be without some reason. He came wearily back to his original point: Since the world could not be as crazy as it appeared to be it must necessarily have been arranged to appear crazy in order to deceive him as to the truth. Why have they done it to him? And what was the truth behind the sham? There must be some clue in the deception itself. What thread ran through it all? Well, in the first place he had been given a superabundance of explanations of the world around him, philosophies, religions, “common sense” explanations. Most of them were so clumsy, so obviously inadequate, or meaningless, that they could hardly have expected him to take them seriously. They must have intended them simply as misdirection."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It is true that most religions which have been offered me teach in mortality, but no the fashion in which they teach it. The surest way to lie convincingly is to tell the truth unconvincingly. They did not wish me to believe."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It may possibly be urged the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organizations, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise from the economic necessities of its technology."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It was fairly evident that at least 90 per cent of all magic, probably more, was balderdash and sheer mystification."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Stop fidgeting, Mr. Randall! I know this is difficult for your little mind, but for once you really must think about something longer than your nose and wider than your mouth believe me!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Why stay in Chicago; what did the town have to justify its existence? One decent boulevard, one decent suburb to the north, priced for the rich, two universities and a lake. As for the rest, endless miles of depressing, dirty streets. The town was one big stockyard."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I sometimes think that my own weakness lies in not realizing the full depths of the weakness and stupidity of men. As a reasonable creature myself I seem to have an unfortunate tendency to expect others unlike myself to be reasonable."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race—quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being. I say ‘art’ advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“But this is crazy, Pete. They must be absolute, complete and teetotal nuts.” “Any law says a cop has to be sane to be on the force?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Rotation through a fourth dimension can’t affect a three-dimensional figure any more than you can shake letters off a printed page."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Why do you like to play chess so well?” “Because it is the only thing in the world where I can see all the factors and understand all the rules.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“People who looked like me and who should have felt very much like me, if what I was told was the truth. But what did they appear to be doing? ‘They went to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the strength to buy the food to earn the money to go to—’ until they fell over dead. Any slight basic variation in the basic pattern did not matter, for they always fell over dead. And everybody tried to tell me that I should be doing the same thing. I knew better!”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a bugle. Pandora’s Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn a pig into sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A.D., maybe—if the human race does not commit suicide before then."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“The trouble with you youngsters,” Joe said, “is that if you can’t understand a thing right off, you think it can’t be true. The trouble with your elders is, anything they didn’t understand they reinterpreted to mean something else and then thought they understood it. None of you has tried believing clear words the way they were written and then tried to understand them on that basis. Oh, no, you’re all too bloody smart for that—if you can’t see it right off, it ain’t so—it must mean something different.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It is an emotional impossibility for any man to believe in his own death."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I think that’s unfair, Doctor. You certainly don’t expect a man to believe in things that run contrary to his good sense without offering him any reasonable explanation.” Frost snorted. “I certainly do—if he has observed it with his own eyes and ears, or gets it from a source known to be credible. A fact doesn’t have to be understood to be true. Sure, any reasonable mind wants explanations, but it’s silly to reject facts that don’t fit your philosophy.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“But that’s not possible!” Frost looked more weary than ever. Don’t you think it is about time you stopped using that term, son?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Narby had no particular respect for engineers, largely because he had no particular talent for engineering."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Bob Wilson admitted to himself that a Ph.D. and an appointment as an instructor was not his idea of existence. Still, it beat working for a living."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In Wilson’s scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Like many a man before him, he found himself forced into a lie because the truth simply would not be believed."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Is it not better to be in ignorance than to believe falsely?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Time after time he had fallen into the Cartesian fallacy, mistaking clear reasoning for correct reasoning."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He thought of a way to state it: Ego is the point of consciousness, the latest term in a continuously expanding series along the line of memory duration. That sounded like a general statement, but he was not sure; he would have to try to formulate it mathematically before he could trust it. Verbal language had such queer booby traps in it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Free will was another matter. It could not be laughed off, because it could be directly experienced—yet his own free will had worked to create the same scene over and over again. Apparently human will must be considered as one of the factors which make up the processes in the continuum—”free” to the ego, mechanistic from the outside."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Convinced of their destiny to rule, they convinced themselves that the end justified the means."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“We see the history of the world as a series of crises in a conflict between two opposing philosophies. Ours is based on the notion that life, consciousness, intelligence, ego is the important thing in the world.”...“That puts us in conflict with every force that tends to destroy, deaden, degrade the human spirit, or to make it act contrary to its nature.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Cold calculated awareness that their power lay in keeping the people in ignorance."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"And all over the country the antagonists of human liberty, of human dignity—the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat-shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the traffickers in human misery and human oppression, themselves somewhat adept in the arts of the mind and acutely aware of the danger of free knowledge—all of this unholy breed stirred uneasily and wondered what was taking place."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"For vice has this defect; it cannot be truly intelligent. Its very motives are its weakness."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Good government grows out of the people; it cannot be handed to them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A half hour later I had a headache and a plan, but it called for an accomplice. The plan, I mean. The headache I could manage alone."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He had the high degree of courage so common in the human race, a race capable of conceiving death, yet able to face its probability daily, on the highway, on the obstetrics table, on the battlefield, in the air, in the subway—and to face lightheartedly the certainty of death in the end."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It takes all nations to keep the peace, but it only takes one to start a war."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Joe, I’ve learned by bitter experience not to trust statements set off by ‘naturally,’ ‘of course,’ or ‘that goes without saying.’”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No, chum, there’s a lot of guff talked about freedom. No man is free. There is no such thing as freedom. There are only various privileges."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There’s one thing this has taught me: You can’t enslave a free man. Only person can do that to a man is himself. No, sir—you can’t enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He was beginning definitely to dislike Mrs. Van Vogel, despite his automatic tendency to genuflect in the presence of a high credit rating."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Men! Their minds were devious—they seemed to like twisted ways of doing things. It confirmed her opinion that men should not be allowed to vote."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Mooncraft isn’t a game; it’s the real thing. ‘Did you stay alive?’ If you make a mistake, you flunk—and they bury you.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“If you know any prayers, better say them.” Sam shook his arm. “It’s not time to pray; it’s time to get busy.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A man without cash had one arm in a sling."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning—it’s never free."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal. “For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren’t up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can’t learn what they must know.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remains in all ages the most pressing problem."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don’t say that I don’t mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used ’copters for a living. You can’t get any commoner. And don’t imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fatal disease—we are alive."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Apparently she believes she is safe. Evil is essentially stupid, Joe; despite her brilliance, she believes what she wishes to believe. Or it may be that she is willing to risk her own death against the tempting prize of absolute power."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Jim, you’re a fool,”Bowles answered. “No, I’m a bachelor. Why? Because I can’t stand the favorite sport of all women.” “Which is?” “Trying to geld stallions. Let’s get on with the job.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“They’re crazy.” “No, Meade. One such is crazy; a lot of them is a lemming death march.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“But you were right!” “Since when has being right endeared a man to his boss?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing—kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Earth, seen from space, looked as it had looked in color-stereo pictures, but he found that the real thing is as vastly more satisfying as a hamburger is better than a picture of one."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Funny sort of science! I guess they were pretty ignorant in those days.” “Don’t go running down our grandfathers. If it weren’t for them, you and I would be squatting in a cave, scratching fleas. No, Bub, they were pretty sharp; they just didn’t have all the facts. We’ve got more facts, but that doesn’t make us smarter.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I don’t like cats.” “Ever lived with a cat? No, I see you haven’t. How can you have the gall not to like something you don’t know anything about? Wait till you’ve lived with a cat, then tell me what you think. Until then...well, who told you you were entitled to an opinion?” “Huh? Why, everybody is entitled to his own opinion!” “Nonsense, Bub. Nobody is entitled to an opinion about something he is ignorant of. If the Captain told me how to bake a cake, I would politely suggest that he not stick his nose into my trade...contrariwise, I never tell him how to plan an orbit to Mars.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Hundred dollar bills have a hypnotic effect on a person not used to them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I was just trying to show you,” he went on, “just how insubstantial a ‘common sense’ idea can be when you pin it down. Neither ‘common sense’ nor ‘logic’ can prove anything. Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.” “I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.” “You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art—the rest of you guys get this, too—if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.” “But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.” “A pencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The door dilated."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“He posed me a question which I must answer correctly—else he will not co-operate.” “Huh? What was the question? “I’ll ask you. Martha, what is the meaning of life?” “What! Why, what a stupid question!” “He did not ask it stupidly.” “It’s a psychopathic question, unlimited, unanswerable, and, in all probability, sense free.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Since when did a mathematician need any tools but his own head? Pythagoras had done well enough with a stick and a stretch of sand."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Can I trust you, my friend?” “If you can’t, then what is my assurance worth?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“But what you’re talking about means giving up all that—just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He’s going to chop down a tree—who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer—who made his gun?...There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He’d be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He’d sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Babies are fun. And they’re not much trouble. Feed ‘em occasionally, help them when they need it, and love them a lot. That’s all there is to it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"So-called instincts are instructive, Felix. They point to survival values."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That’s a personal evaluation, of course."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I venture to predict that, when we get around to reviewing their records, we will find that the rebels were almost all—all, perhaps—men who had never been outstandingly successful at anything. Their only prominence was among themselves."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“If there was anything, anything more at all, after this crazy mix-up we call living, I could feel that there might be some point to the whole frantic business, even if I did not know and could not know the full answer while I was alive.” “And suppose there was not? Suppose that when a man’s body disintegrates, he himself disappears absolutely. I’m bound to say I find it a probable hypothesis.” “Well— It wouldn’t be cheerful knowledge, but it would be better than not knowing. You could plan your life rationally, at least. A man might even be able to get a certain amount of satisfaction in planning things better for the future, after he’s gone. A vicarious pleasure in the anticipation.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Hamilton took a deep breath, let it out, then said, “Listen to me. I don’t know much about women, and sometimes it seems like I didn’t know anything about them. But I’m sure of this—she won’t let a little thing like you taking a pot shot at her stand in the way if you ever had any chance with her at all. She’ll forgive you.” “You don’t really mean that, do you?” Monroe-Alpha’s face was still tragic, but he clutched at the hope. “Certainly I do. Women will forgive anything.” With a flash of insight he added, “Otherwise the race would have died out long ago.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no subject inappropriate for scientific research. Johann, we’ve let you fellows have a monopoly of such matters for too long. The most serious questions in the world have been left to faith or speculation. It is time for scientists to cope with them, or admit that science is no more than pebble counting."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.” “Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Oh, we get along. She lets me have my own way, and later I find out I’ve done just what she wanted me to do."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Theobald ignored him. He could be deaf when he chose; he seemed to find it particularly difficult to hear the word “No.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Natural selection—the dying out of the poorly equipped—goes on day in and day out, inexorable and automatic. It is as tireless, as inescapable, as entropy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What of it? I’d still be myself. I don’t care what people think.” “You’re mistaken, son. To believe that you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That’s a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It’s a good thing."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Wong shook his head sadly. “I sometimes think that modern education is deliberately designed to handicap a boy.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“People tend to fall into three psychological types, all differently motivated. There is the type, motivated by economic factors, money...And there is the type motivated by ‘face,’ or pride. This type is a spender, fighter, boaster, lover, sportsman, gambler; he has a will to power and an itch for glory. And there is the professional type, which claims to follow a code of ethics rather than simply seeking money or glory—priests and ministers, teachers, scientists, medical men, some artists and writers. The idea is that such a man believes that he is devoting his life to some purpose more important than his individual self. You follow me?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I wish Doc Pickering was here.” “Yeah, and if fish had feet, they’d be mice.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Precedent is merely the assumption that somebody else, in the past with less information, nevertheless knows better than the man on the spot."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Sometimes I think,” he told Tex, “that Th’Wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron—but flunking the course.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Jim?” “Yes, Dad.” “What’s this about leaving your gun where the baby could reach it?” Jim flushed. “It wasn’t charged, Dad.” “If all the people who had been killed with unloaded guns were laid end to end it would make quite a line up. You are proud of being a licensed gun wearer, aren’t you? “Uh, yes, sir.” “And I’m proud to have you be one. It means you are a responsible, trusted adult. But when I sponsored you before the Council and stood up with you when you took your oath, I guaranteed that you would obey the regulations and follow the code, wholeheartedly and all the time—not just most of the time. Understand me?” “Yes, sir. I think I do.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Never listen to newscasts. Saves wear and tear on the nervous system."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Doc says the Company set-up is just one big happy family, and the idea that it is a non-profit corporation is the biggest joke since women were invented."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I’m not going to give up my gun. Dad wouldn’t want me to. I’m sure of that. Anyhow, I’m licensed and I don’t have to. I’m a qualified marksman, I’ve passed the psycho tests, and I’ve taken the oath; I’m as much entitled to wear a gun as he is."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“He’ll pay no mind to me anyhow,” MacRae answered. “That’s the healthy thing about kids.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I found out a long time ago that you have to take some chances in this life. Otherwise you are just a vegetable, headed for the soup pot."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“You put me in mind of a case I ran into in the American West. A respected citizen shot a professional gunthrower in the back. When asked why he didn’t give the other chap a chance to draw, the survivor said, ‘Well, he’s dead and I’m alive and that’s how I wanted it to be.’ Jamie, if you use sportsmanship on a known scamp, you put yourself at a terrible disadvantage.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Thanks, awfully,” said Thomas. “Now...uh...what do I owe you for this?” Finney’s reaction made him feel as if he had uttered some indecency. “Don’t mention payment, my son! Money is wrong—it’s the means whereby man enslaves his brother.” “I beg your pardon, sir,” Thomas apologized sincerely. “Nevertheless, I wish there were some way for me to do something for you.” “That is another matter. Help your brother when you can, and help will come to you when you need it.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Three things only do slaves require, food, work, and their gods, and of the three their gods must never be touched, else they grow troublesome."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"These savages and their false gods! I grow weary of them. Yet they are necessary; the priests and the gods of slaves always fight on the side of the Masters. It is a rule of nature."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"They made a good team. As a matter of fact their talents were not too far apart; the artist is two-thirds artisan and the artisan has essentially the same creative urge as the artist."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We don’t have to be convincing—not in the sense of getting converts. Real converts might prove to be a nuisance. We just have to be convincing enough to look like a legitimate religion to our overlords. And that doesn’t have to be very convincing. All religions look equally silly from the outside."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Scheer, are you any good at counterfeiting?” “I’ve never tried it, sir.” “No time like the present. Every man needs an alternative profession.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Sex is rearing its interesting head."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A man has to grow up in a language to be able to understand it scrambled."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When had a slave religion proved anything but an aid to the conqueror? Slaves needed a wailing wall; they went into their temples, prayed to their gods to deliver them from oppression, and came out to work in the fields and factories, relaxed and made harmless by the emotional catharsis of prayer."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Any cipher can be broken, any code can be compromised. But the most exact academic knowledge of a language gives no clue to its slang, its colloquial allusions, its half statements, over statements, and inverted meanings."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What sort of a remark?” “Just priestly mumbo-jumbo. Impressive and no real meaning. Can you do it?” “I think so—I used to sell magazine subscriptions.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Look, Chief—is it really necessary to kill everybody here? I don’t relish it.” “Don’t get chicken, son,” admonished Ardmore with an edge in his voice. “This is war—and war is no joke. There is no such thing as a humane war.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“People have a funny habit of taking as ‘natural’ whatever they are used to—but there hasn’t been any ‘natural’ environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I looked it up later; he was right. Dad is an absolute mine of useless information. He says a fact should be loved for itself alone."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"See how involved it gets? Clover, bees, nitrogen, escape speed, power, plant-animal balance, gas laws, compound interest laws, meteorology—a mathematical ecologist has to think of everything and think of it ahead of time. Ecology is explosive; what seems like a minor and harmless invasion can change the whole balance."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It was so darn quiet you could hear your hair grow."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Pioneers need good neighbors."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"For three hundred years the race had glazed windows. Then they shut themselves up in little air-conditioned boxes and stared at silly television pictures instead. One might as well be on Luna."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Gravity’s books have got to balance."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Horses can manufacture more horses and that is one trick that tractors have never learned."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You can only grieve so much; after that it’s self pity."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I said, “What do you think about it, Paul?” The boss smiled gently. “I don’t. I haven’t enough data.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I’m not raising any kids to be radioactive dust."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I’m going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he’s just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is one thing no head of a country can know, and that is: how good is his intelligence system? He finds out only by having it fail him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The Old Man’s unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily with the commonplace. Not much, eh? Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; “I-just-can’t-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There was nothing under her clothes but girl and assorted items of lethal hardware."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Let me get this,” the Old Man said. “You are promising the human race that, if we will just surrender, you will take care of us and make us happy. Right?” “Exactly!” The Old Man studied this while looking past my shoulders. He spat on the floor. “You know,” he said slowly, “me and my kind, we have often been offered that bargain. It never worked out worth a damn.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Mary? After all, what was she? Just another babe. True, I was disgusted with her for letting herself be used as bait. It was all right for her to use her femaleness as an agent; the Section had to have female operatives. There have always been female spies, and the young and pretty ones have always used the same tools."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Listen, son—most women are damn fools and children. But they’ve got more range than we’ve got. The brave ones are braver, the good ones are better—and the vile ones are viler."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"McIlvaine continued, “Take the amoeba—a more basic, and much more successful life form than ours. The motivational psychology of the amoeba—” I switched off my ears; free speech gives a man the right to talk about the “psychology” of an amoeba, but I don’t have to listen."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Marriage is not ownership and wives are not property."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The matter was still "Top Secret" and the subject of cabinet debates at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don't ask me why it was top secret, or even restricted; our government has gotten the habit of classifying anything as secret which the all-wise statesmen and bureaucrats decide we are not big enough boys and girls to know, a Mother-Knows-Best-Dear policy. I've read that there used to be a time when a taxpayer could demand the facts on anything and get them. I don't know; it sounds Utopian."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What is a ‘hunch’?” “Eh? It’s a belief that something is so, or isn’t so, without evidence.” “I’d call a hunch the result of automatic reasoning below the conscious level on data you did not know you possessed.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In the army it takes an eight-man working party to help a brass hat blow his nose."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Beat the plowshares back into swords; the other was a maiden aunt’s fancy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He was still having trouble readjusting. Wars were something you studied, not something that actually happened."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don, have you been dealing with a booklegger?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The point is, your request for a lawyer comes about two hundred years too late to be meaningful. The verbalisms lag behind the facts. Nevertheless, you shall have a lawyer—or a lollipop, whichever you prefer, after I am through questioning you. If I were you, I’d take the lollipop. More nourishing."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He considered horoscopes as silly as spectacles on a cow."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He had let himself be bulldozed by the odds against him. He promised himself never again to pay any attention to the odds, but only to the issues."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Mercifully, we stay our hand. Earth’s cities will not be bombed. The free citizens of Venus Republic have no wish to slaughter their cousins still on Terra. Our only purpose is to establish our own independence, to manage our own affairs, to throw off the crushing yoke of absentee ownership and taxation without representation which has bleed us poor. In doing so, in so taking our stand as free men, we call on all oppressed and impoverished nations everywhere to follow our lead, accept our help. Look up into the sky! Swimming there above you is the very station from which I now address you. The fat and stupid rulers of the Federation have made of Circum-Terra an overseer’s whip. The threat of this military base in the sky has protected their empire from the just wrath of their victims for more then five score years. We now crush it. In a matter of minutes this scandal in the clean skies, this pistol pointed at the heads of men everywhere on your planet, will cease to exist. Step out of doors, watch the sky. Watch a new sun blaze briefly, and know that its light is the light of Liberty inviting all of Earth to free itself. Subject peoples of Earth, we free men of the free Republic of Venus salute you with that sign!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A second sun blazed white and swelled visibly as he watched. What on Earth would have been—so many times had been—a climbing mushroom cloud was here in open space a perfect geometrical sphere, growing unbelievably. It swelled still larger, dropping from limelight white to to silvery violet, became blotched with purple, red and flame. And still it grew, until it blanked out the earth beyond it. At the time it had been transformed into a radioactive cosmic cloud Circum-Terra had been passing over, or opposite, the North Atlantic; the swollen incandescent cloud was visible to most of the habitable portions of the globe, a burning symbol in the sky."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Man needs freedom, but few men are so strong as to be happy with complete freedom. A man needs to be part of a group, with accepted and respected relationships. Some men join foreign legions for adventure; still more swear on a bit of paper in order to acquire a framework of duties and obligations, customs and taboos, a time to work and a time to loaf, a comrade to dispute with and a sergeant to hate—in short, to belong."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don took it and said, “Uh, thanks! That’s awfully kind of you. I’ll pay it back, first chance.” “Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The attack should not have happened, of course. The rice farmer sergeant had been perfectly right; the Federation could not afford to risk its own great cites to punish the villagers of Venus. He was right—from his viewpoint. A rice farmer has one logic; the men who live by and for power have another and entirely different logic. Their lives are built on tenuous assumptions, fragile as reputation; they could not afford to ignore a challenge to their power—the Federation could not afford not to punish the insolent colonists."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He gave up and went back to loafing, found that he could sleep all right in the afternoons but that the practice kept him awake at night."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Chief, perhaps it would be clearest to say that the fasarta modulates the garbab in such a phase relationship that the thrimaleen is forced to bast—or, to put it another way, somebody loosed mice in the washroom. Seriously, there is no popular way to explain it. If you were willing to spend five hard years with me, working up through the math, I could probably bring you to the same level of ignorance and confusion that I enjoy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"She grabbed him by both ears and kissed him quickly, then ran away. Don stared after her, rubbing his mouth. Girls, he reflected, were much odder than dragons. Probably another race entirely."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I am not going to talk about religious beliefs, but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbors. I know their faults and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults. Take Father Michael down our road a piece — I'm not of his creed, but I know the goodness and charity and lovingkindness that shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike; if I'm in trouble, I'll go to him. My next-door neighbor is a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat. No fee — no prospect of a fee. I believe in Doc."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses...in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I believe that almost all politicians are honest. For every bribed alderman there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work. If this were not true, we would never have gotten past the thirteen colonies."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I believe in — I am proud to belong to — the United States. Despite shortcomings, from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history. And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown — in the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability … and goodness … .of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth, that we always make it just by the skin of our teeth — but that we will always make it … survive … endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure — will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage — and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Every technology goes through three stages: first a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Mr. Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you’re going to be businessmen, don’t confuse the vocation with larceny."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“You have us going faster than light.” “I thought the figures were a bit large.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The situation has multifarious ramifications not immediately apparent to the unassisted optic."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“It didn’t happen that way,” Roger Stone cut in, “so there is no use talking about other possibilities. They probably aren’t really possibilities at all, if only we understood it.” Pollux: “Predestination.” Castor: “Very shaky theory.” Roger grinned. “I’m not a determinist and you can’t get my goat. I believe in free will.” Pollux: “Another very shaky theory.” “Make up your minds,” their father told them. “You can’t have it both ways.” “Why not?” asked Hazel. “Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.” “Not mathematical,” objected Pollux. Castor nodded. “Just poetry.” “And not very good poetry.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Go ahead. Go right ahead. Don’t let me discourage you. Any objections from me would simply confirm your preconceptions."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But as grandpop always said, there are just three ways to get ahead; sweat and genius, getting born into the right family, or marrying into it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Max opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “No.” “Speak louder. You used a word I don’t understand.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Everybody has a skeleton in the closet; the thing is to keep ’em there and not at the feast."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A distance “as the crow flies” is significant only to crows."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn’t there."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Sic transit gloria mundi—Tuesday is usually worse."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Oh Max, you large lout, you arouse the eternal maternal in me."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“You know, Ellie, you play this game awfully well—for a girl.” “Thank you too much.” “No, I mean it. I suppose girls are probably as intelligent as men, but most of them don’t act like it. I think it’s because they don’t have to. If a girl is pretty, she doesn’t have to think.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Mr. Jones, has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear too bright?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I guess I don’t understand women.” “That’s an understatement.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The law is whatever you can convince a court it is."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It seemed to John that most of the older people in the world spent much of their time not listening."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Any organization calling itself “The Friends of This or That” always consisted of someone with an axe to grind, plus the usual assortment of prominent custard heads and professional stuffed shirts."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I talked with it, boss. It’s stupid.” “I can’t see that you have established that. Assuming that an e.-t. is stupid because he can’t speak our language well is like assuming that an Italian is illiterate because he speaks broken English. A non-sequitur.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you can’t outargue the other fellow, sometimes you can outlive him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“May I say without offense that the reception given my sort on your great planet is sometimes something that one must be philosophical about?” “I know. I’m sorry. My own people, most of them, are honestly convinced that the prejudices of their native village were ordained by the Almighty. I wish it were different.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I do not like weapons, Doctor; they are the last resort of faulty diplomacy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Heredity isn’t everything; I’m myself, an individual. You aren’t your parents. You’re not your father, you are not your mother. But you are a little late realizing it.” She sat up straight. “So be yourself, Knothead, and have the courage to make your own mess of your life. Don’t imitate somebody else’s mess.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Fact is, you work too hard...the universe won’t run down if you don’t wind it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“You mean that, Henry?” “I always mean what I say, sir. It saves time.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Madam, the commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Remember, though, your best weapon is between your ears and under your scalp—provided it’s loaded."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The death rate is the same for us as for anybody...one person, one death, sooner or later."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Cut it out. If there is anything stupider that flogging yourself over something you can’t help, I’ve yet to meet it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"One time in a hundred a gun might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“From the ignoramuses we get for recruits I’ve reached the conclusion that this new-fangled ‘functional education’ has abolished studying in favor of developing their cute little personalities.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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""Good stories are rarely true."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Shaving, the common cold, and taxes...my old man says those are the three eternal problems the race is never going to lick."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When you haven’t data, guessing is illogical."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Rod...were you born that stupid? Or did you have to study?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But don’t say you don’t need money; that’s immoral."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I was confused. I didn’t feel telepathic; I merely felt hungry."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Pat, can’t you get it through your thick head to leave well enough alone?” “I don’t see what’s wrong with my logic.” “Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When it comes down to it, the root cause of war is always population pressure no matter what other factors enter in."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I don’t know; maybe Frank had good intentions, but I sometimes think “good intentions” should be declared a capital crime."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Parents probably don’t know that they are playing favorites even when they are doing it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I decided not to cross any bridges I had burned behind me."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Learning isn’t a means to an end; it is an end in itself."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Attend me. How do you prove that there are eggs in a bird’s nest? Don’t strain your gray matter: go climb the tree and find out. There is no other way."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You have to believe evidence when you have it in front of you, or else the universe is just too fantastic."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Harry, I need advice.” “You do? Well, I’ve got it in all sizes. All of it free and all of it worth what it costs, I’m afraid.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Aside from a cold appreciation of my own genius I felt that I was a modest man."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics. I had sampled them — public libraries are a ready source of recreation for an actor short of cash — but I had found them as poor in vitamins as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything. I had the same contempt for the moral instruction handed to most children. Much of it is prattle and the parts they really seem to mean are dedicated to the sacred proposition that a “good” child is one who does not disturb mother’s nap and a “good” man is one who achieves a muscular bank account without getting caught. No, thanks!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong — but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"His bow to me must have been calculated on a slide rule; it suggested that I was about to be Supreme Minister but was not quite there yet, that I was his senior but nevertheless a civilian — then subtract five degrees for the fact that he wore the Emperor’s aiguillette on his right shoulder."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"People don’t really want change, any change at all — and xenophobia is very deep-rooted. But we progress, as we must — if we are to go out to the stars."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people. Perhaps their lives have no cosmic significance, but they have feelings. They can hurt."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can’t have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don’t rate it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"An invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I had taken a partner once before—but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?” “I guess so. Yes, I'm sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.” “She sounds like a sensible person.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; He listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you lie to me, I’ll catch you…eventually. Lying to other people is your business, but I can tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"As Thorby learned to use his mind, he found that he liked to; he developed an insatiable appetite for the printed page."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But mathematics Thorby saw no use in, other than the barbaric skill of counting money. But presently he learned that mathematics need not have use; it was a game, like chess but more fun."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Do you know what an anthropologist is?” “Uh, I am sorry, ma’am—Margaret.” “It’s simpler than it sounds. An anthropologist is a scientist who studies how people live together.” Thorby looked doubtful. “This is a science?” “Sometimes I wonder. Actually, Thorby, it is a complicated study, because the patterns that men work out to live together seem unlimited.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"With rank goeth privileges—so it ever shall be. But also with it go responsibility and obligation, always more onerous than the privileges are pleasant."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist’s view, ’justice’ is a search for workable customs.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Pop, who maintained that a wise man could not be insulted, since truth could not insult and untruth was not worthy of notice."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Most things are right or wrong only in their backgrounds; few things are good or evil in themselves. But things that are right or wrong according to their culture, really are so."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He was caught in the old dilemma of the man with unintegrated values, who eats meat but would rather somebody else did the butchering."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Since Thorby had no talent he became an actor."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I’m not lazy, I’m efficient."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Pay, are all paymasters dishonest?” “Only the good ones.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But I warn you, it won’t be fun. Nobody owns a business; the business owns him. You’re a slave to it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I used to wonder what it was like to be rich. Now I am and it turns out to be mostly headaches."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What can I do for you?” “Uh, is this confidential?” “Privileged, son. The word is ‘privileged.’ You don’t ask a lawyer that; he’s either honest or he ain’t. Me, I’m middlin’ honest. You take your chances.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Son, people do odd things for money, but they’ll do still more drastic things for power over money. Anybody sittin’ close to a billion credits is in danger; it’s like keeping a pet rattlesnake."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No philosophy that he had ever heard or read gave any reasonable purpose for man's existence, nor any rational clue to his proper conduct. Basking in the sunshine might be as good a thing to do with one's life as any other — but it was not for him and he knew it, even if he could not define how he knew it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Life is short, but the years are long."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time — 10: 17 P.M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must. The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn't like his looks — I never had — but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep's smile."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau — counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn't I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A Paradox May Be Paradoctored."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I glanced at the ring on my finger. The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever … I know where I came from — but where did all you zombies come from?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me — Jane — here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Dr. Russell, I concede that Washington has an atrocious climate. But you will have air-conditioned offices.” “With clocks, no doubt. And secretaries. And soundproofing.” “Anything you want, doctor.” “The point is, Mr. Secretary, I don’t want them. This household has no clocks. Nor calendars. Once I had a large income and a larger ulcer; I now have a small income and no ulcer. I stay here.” “But the job needs you.” “The need is not mutual.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Television leaves no external scars."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We lived like that “Happy Family“ you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When I don’t understand, I have an unbearable itch to know why."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can't use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty — a K&E 20-inch Log-log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week — but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You're in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Some people insist that “mediocre” is better than “best.” They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Peewee!” I said sharply. “You're not listening.” “What were you doing talking,” she answered reasonably, “when I wasn’t listening?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I've heard all the usual Sweetness and Light that kids get pushed at them—how they should always forgive, how there’s some good in the worst of us, etc. But when I see a black widow, I step on it; I don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. A black widow spider can’t help it—but that’s the point."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Die trying” is the proudest human thing."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When a fact came along, he junked theories that failed to match."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The best things in history are accomplished by people who get “tired of being shoved around.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Jealousy is a disease; love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often confuses one for the other, or assumes the greater the love, the greater the jealousy. In fact they are almost incompatible; both at once produce unbearable turmoil."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with — in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called "morals." Most of us know the code is wrong; almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul — and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code ... so automatically your stomach did flip-flops ... and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Here is this poor little caryatid who has tried — and failed, fallen under the load. She's a good girl — look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, but not blaming anyone else, not even the gods… and still trying to shoulder her load, after she's crumpled under it. But she's more than good art denouncing some very bad art; she's a symbol for every woman who has ever tried to shoulder a load that was too heavy for her — over half the female population of this planet, living and dead, I would guess. But not alone women — this symbol is sexless. It means every man and every woman who ever lived who sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude, whose courage wasn't even noticed until they crumpled under their loads."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“So you say ‘Politics!’ as if it were a nasty word—and you think that settles it.” He sighed. “But you don’t understand. Politics is not evil; politics is the human race’s most magnificent achievement. When politics is good, it’s wonderful…and when politics is bad—well, it’s still pretty good.” “I guess I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done...without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody’s head bashed in. That’s politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in...and that is what happens when one or both sides is no longer willing to dicker. That’s why I say politics is good even when it is bad…because the only alternative is force—and somebody gets hurt.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Old age is not an accomplishment; it is just something that happens to you despite yourself, like falling downstairs."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I called after him but he just kept going. Clark is not hard of hearing but he can be very hard of listening."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Clark just looked bored and contemptuous and said nothing, because Clark would not bother to interfere with Armageddon unless there was ten percent in it for him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I really am a good listener because you never can tell when you will pick up something useful—and all in the world any woman has to do to be considered “charming” by men is to listen while they talk."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It’s lots better to be miserable than to be bored."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Oh, sure, I learned about other systems in school—but it didn’t soak in. Now I am beginning to grasp emotionally that There Are Other Ways Than Ours…and that people can be happy under them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The tragedy about Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young but that the boy-meets-girl reflex should be so overpowering as to defeat all common sense."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A baby is lots more fun than differential equations."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In sober truth no person can ever be truly responsible for another human being. Each one of us faces up to the universe alone, and the universe is what it is and it doesn’t soften the rules for any of us—and eventually, in the long run, the universe always wins and takes all. But that doesn’t make it any easier when we try to be responsible for one another—as you have, as I have—and then look back and see how we could have done it better."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I told him it was wrong, I said that he mustn’t take the law in his own hands. “What law?” he said. “There isn’t any law here. And you aren’t being logical, Pod. Anything that is right for a group to do is right for one person to do.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Anything that is moral for a group to do is moral for one person to do.” There must be a flaw in that, since I’ve always been taught that it is wrong to take the law in your own hands. But I can’t find the flaw and it sounds axiomatic, self-evident. Switch it around. If something is wrong for one person to do, can it possibly be made right by having a lot of people (a government) agree to do it together? Even unanimously? If anything is wrong, it is wrong—and vox populi can’t change it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Poddy’s greatest weakness—the really soft place in her head, she’s not too stupid otherwise—is her almost total inability to grasp that some people are as bad as they are. Evil. Poddy never has understood evil. Naughtiness is about as far as her imagination reaches."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Mr. Farnham!” You think they are going to attack?” Her host shrugged. “The Kremlin doesn’t let me in on its secrets.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No government has yet been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“We’re going to die. Aren’t we?” “Yes.” “I thought so. Before morning?” “Oh, no! I feel sure we can live till noon.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person’s behavior. I spoke of myself as ‘responsible’ for this group, that was verbal shorthand. The most I can do—or you, or any leader—is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You know that color does not matter to me. I want to know other things about a man. Is his word good? Does he meet his obligations? Does he do honest work? Is he brave? Will he stand up and be counted?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We have everything for a still; I stocked the items to build one if a war came along—not just for us but because liquor is money in any primitive society."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The concept of change baffled them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We are all free—to walk our appointed paths. Just as a stone is free to fall when you toss it into the air. No one is free in the abstract meaning you give the word."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Hugh shut up. He was thinking glumly that Ponse was not a villain. He was exactly like the members of every ruling class in history: honestly convinced of his benevolence and hurt if it was challenged."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Why do you think this gossip is true?” “Uh…I heard it and checked around. Everybody knows it.” “So? Everybody knew the Earth was flat, at one time.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgment."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He did not want Barbara ever to feel the deadening load of hopelessness that could—and had, all through history—turned chaste women into willing concubines. Much as he loved her, he had no illusions that Barbara was either angel or saint; the Sabine women had stood no chance and neither would she. “Death before dishonor!” was a slogan that did not wear well. In time, it changed to happy cooperation."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person’s actions. He believed it, he tried to live by it. But he found that cold wisdom no comfort."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"This matter of racial differences—or the nonsense notion of “racial equality”—had never been examined scientifically; there was too much emotion on both sides. No one wanted honest data…. Nevertheless, this confused matter of races would never be straightened out—because almost nobody wanted the truth."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"TANSTAAFL."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Going to dance at my wake?” “I don’t dance,” the lawyer answered, “but you tempt me to learn.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Fighting continued on a token basis, and the dead did not complain."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I’m not trying to frighten you, but only a fool makes predictions based on ignorance; I am not that sort of fool."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A man who marries at my age isn’t taking a wife, he’s indenturing a nurse."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Between being ‘right’ and being kind, I know which way I vote."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we’ll ever eliminate taxes."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"When you’re rich, you don’t have friends; you just have endless acquaintances."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It’s impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he’s eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he’ll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Boats and ships are female because they are beautiful, lovable, expensive—and unpredictable."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I don’t think Father Hugo is any more mistaken than the most learned theologian and he might be closer to the truth. Jacob, I don’t think anyone knows Who’s in charge."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me—death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Progress doesn't come from early risers &mdash; progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"All men are created unequal."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing —and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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""No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be." But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it —and I don't."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You live and learn. Or you don't live long."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors — and miss."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In this complex world, science, the scientific method, and the consequences of the scientific method are central to everything the human race is doing and to wherever we are going. If we blow ourselves up we will do it by misapplication of science; if we manage to keep from blowing ourselves up, it will be through intelligent application of science."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she'll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college — and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child ... and it is still moral behavior even when it fails."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called "patriotism." Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind. The door they opened leads to the hope that H. sapiens will survive indefinitely long, even longer than this solid planet on which we stand tonight. As a direct result of what they did, it is now possible that the human race will never die. Many short-sighted fools think that going to the Moon was just a stunt. But the astronauts knew the meaning of what they were doing, as is shown by Neil Armstrong's first words in stepping down onto the soil of Luna: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.""

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on ... as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you've had it, you're done, you're through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I said that "Patriotism" is a way of saying "Women and children first." And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did. In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it. One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her. But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck — Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free ... and the train hit them. The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed — and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself. The husband's behavior was heroic ... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him. This is how a man dies. This is how a man ... lives!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"This Universe never did make sense; I suspect that it was built on government contract."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No philosopher allows his opinions to be swayed by facts—he would be kicked out of his guild. Theologians, the lot of them."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won’t be wrong too often."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I can’t evaluate my opinions of right and wrong because I learned them from my parents and haven’t lived long enough to have formed opinions in disagreement with theirs."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Sharpie, you’ve got a one-track mind.” “It’s the main track. Reproduction is the main track; the methods and mores of sexual copulation are the central feature of all higher developments of life.” “You’re ignoring money and television.” “Piffle! All human activities including scientific research are either mating dances and care of the young, or the dismal sublimations of born losers in the only game in town.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I am learning that we still have things to learn."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that “news” is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I wish they wouldn’t hold mornings so early."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“‘Magic,’” I stated, “is a symbol for any process not understood.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I carried out my purpose: War and Peace, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and so forth. Would you believe it? Something is gained in translation; the originals are even more depressing and soporific than translations. I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It’s a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It is better to be a lively frump than a stylish corpse."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I am forced to conclude that being right has little to do with holding a woman’s affections."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I trust that I am honest with myself. I know that I am not very sociable and I expect to go on being so; a man capable of creative work has no time to spare for fools who would like to visit."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Let me add,” he went on, “that since I handle secret and most-secret despatches, I know things that I don’t know, if I make my meaning clear.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I learned before you were born that when someone wants to see me in a hurry, the urgency is almost never mutual."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius...but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat...unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees...but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"As for population, every major shortcoming of our native planet could be traced to one cause: too many people, not enough planet."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"One can’t expect logic from males; they think with their testicles and act from their emotions."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“It is the most indecent outfit I’ve ever seen, with no other purpose than to excite lewd, libidinous, lascivious, licentious, lecherous, lustful longings in the loins of Lotharios.” “Isn’t that the purpose of clothing?” “Well...aside from protection—yes.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Here is the wisdom of the ages: Men rule but women decide."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"As I once heard Andrew—that’s my disappearing brother—say: ‘Life consist in accommodating oneself to the Universe.’ Although the rest of our family has never taken that view. We believe if forcing the Universe to accommodate itself to us. It’s all a question of which one is to be master."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don’t worry about it. There is less here than meets the eye."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, One Meter Wide and Two Meters Long."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that’s philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that’s science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy’s Law, sometimes offset in part by Brewster’s Factor: that’s engineering."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Friday, don’t despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until the fighting starts."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But I do not willingly involve us in nationalistic wars; the side of the angels is seldom self-evident."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Marriages are arranged in heaven but the bills must be paid here on earth."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I had hit him in his male pride. Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You’re not a stranger; you’re an old friend we haven’t known very long."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Georges, I don’t know much about California politics—” “My dear, no one knows much about California politics, including California politicians.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Religious” = “absolute belief without proof.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts; those who know this and those who do not."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension. Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“So far as I have listened, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.” “Elementary. Go on.” “Well…high taxation is important and so is inflation of the currency and the ratio of the productive to those on the public payroll. But that’s old hat; everybody knows that a country is on the skids when its income and outgo get out of balance and stay that way—even though there are always endless attempts to wish it away by legislation.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Self-pity, he said, is the most demoralizing of all vices."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I think that you are immune to the temptations of religion. If you are not, I cannot help you, any more than I could keep you from acquiring a drug habit. A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong—and you are strong. The great trouble with religion—any religion—is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask in at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason—but one cannot have both."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Las Vegas is a three-ring circus with a hangover."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I had learned lately that wanting something and being able to pay for it were not the same."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Don’t kid yourself, Friday; knowing too much is a capital offense. In politics it always has been."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"People who are busy and happy don’t write diaries; they are too busy living."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Time is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can't do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life’s innocent pleasures."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A friend who offers help without asking for explanations is a treasure beyond price."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"This is why criminologists place more faith in circumstantial evidence than they do in the testimony of eyewitnesses. You are the ideal eyewitness, intelligent, sincere, cooperative, and honest. You have reported a mixture of what you did see, what you thought you saw, what you failed to notice although it was in front of you, and what your logical mind fills in as necessities linking what you saw and what you thought you saw. This mixture is now all solidly in your mind as a true memory, a firsthand, eyewitness memory. But it didn’t happen."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Every closet has a skeleton. This is a natural law."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I scrolled on down to the obituaries. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But I did not explain to you the other insidious aspect of writing. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary...because it hurts less to write than it does not to write."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I didn’t want him dead. Unless you are on a battlefield or in a hospital, a corpse is an embarrassment, hard to explain. The management was bound to be stuffy about it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Almost all crime depends on the acquiescence of the victim. If the victim refuses his assigned role, the criminal is placed at a disadvantage, one so severe that it usually takes an understanding and compassionate judge to set things right. I had broken the rules; I had fought back."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“My uncle used to say, ‘Never pick up a stray kitten…unless you’ve already made up your mind to be owned by it.’”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Beloved, you startled me with the notion that bad manners could be judged a hanging offense. My only concern is for evil, rather than for bad manners. I think evil deeds should never go unpunished. God’s arrangements for punishing evil are too slow to suit me; I want it done now."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"For dying is not to be feared—it is the final comfort. As we all learn, eventually."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A monarch’s neck should always have a noose around it—it keeps him upright."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"They were both of the extremely opposite sex and just being around them was fun."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You’re not stupid, Richard, just spiritual."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Shrinks are the blind leading the blind; even the best of them are dealing from a short deck. Anyone who consults a shrink should have his head examined."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Buster always was the pragmatist. His solution to almost any problem was to cut somebody’s throat.” “Well, it’s a convincing argument,” I admitted."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I’m a hard case. I don’t believe in table-tapping, astrology, virgin birth—” “Virgin birth isn’t difficult.” “I mean, in the theological sense; I’m not talking about genetics laboratories. —virgin birth, numerology, a literal hell, magic, witchcraft, campaign promises. You tell me something that runs contrary to horse sense; I’ll be at least as hard to sell as I was about your ancient years.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“This computer became self-aware and acquired free will.” “Interesting. If true. I don’t have to believe it. I don’t.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"This sort of nonsense should be lumped with transubstantiation. If true, it can’t be proved."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it—once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know,’ then it becomes possible to get at the truth.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"How can you argue with a woman who won’t?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"It would be silly of me to argue with something I don’t understand."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There ought to be some rule limiting the number of emotional shocks a person can legally be subjected to in one day."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Dr. Harshaw says that ’the word “love” designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one’s own happiness.’”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A wife’s unique right, fixed by tradition, to manipulate her own husband runs unbroken and invariant at least back to Eve and the Apple. I will not criticize a sacred tradition."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Would you find that convincing?” “No.” Justin Foote nodded. “Reasonable. When a rational man hears something asserted that conflicts with all common sense he will not—and should not—believe it without compelling evidence."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Uh, I find I’m astonished again. How is this place run? Is it an anarchy?” Hazel shrugged. Justin Foote looked thoughtful. “No, I wouldn’t say so. It is not that well organized.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A beautiful summer day in Iowa leaves no room for worry."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"File off the serial numbers, change the body lines a bit, give it a new paint job, switch it over the state line, and it’s yours!—that’s the secret of literary success. Editors always claim to be looking for new stories but they don’t buy them; they buy “mixture as before.” Because the cash customers want to be entertained, not amazed, not instructed, not frightened."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“The answer to ‘Why’ is always ‘Money.’”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Billiards will never replace sex, or even tomatoes."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Protocol is either useful or it should be abolished."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can’t do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of the lack."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Women and cats do what they do; there is nothing a man can do about it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. (needs chapter and page reference, please)"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Remember that ancient Persian parable about doubling grains of rice on a chessboard? Four billion people are a smidgen larger than a grain of rice; you quickly run out of chessboard."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“What code should I follow, father?” “You have to pick your own.” “The Ten Commandments?” “You know better than that. The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Censorship is never logical but, like cancer, it is dangerous to ignore it when it shows up."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I said God but you know what I mean!” “I do indeed. You are indulging in theology; I would rather see you take laudanum. Maureen, when anyone talks about ‘God’s will’ or ‘God’s intentions’ or Nature’s intentions if he is afraid to say ‘God,’ I know at once that he is selling a gold brick. To himself, in some cases, as you were just doing.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A proud self image is the strongest incentive you can have toward correct behavior."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We are strangers, all of us, family most of all."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Father had long since cured me of any belief in the Apostles’ Creed. In its place I held a deep suspicion, planted by Professor Huxley and nurtured by father, that no such person as Jesus of Nazareth had ever lived. As for Brother Timberly, I regarded him as two yards of noise, with his cracks filled with unction. Like many preachers in the Bible Belt, he was a farm boy with (I strongly suspected) a distaste for real work. I did not and do not believe in a god up there in the sky listening to Brother Timberly’s words."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Now look carefully at what I said. I said that I know that these things are asserted. I did not say that they are true."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"What he did have was a loud voice and no respect for tyrants. Tyrants hate people like that."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No, I did not decide I was in love with him, after all. Enough men had had me by then that I was not inclined to mistake a hearty orgasm for eternal love."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"And for the first time both of us were bare all over and it was wonderful and I knew that all my life had just been preparation for this moment."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But it is no joke to attend the funeral of a dear friend, dead in her golden youth because her baby killed her. I was at such a funeral in the twenties and heard a sleek old priest talk about “God’s will.” At the graveside I managed to back away from the coffin such that I got him proper in his instep with a sharp heel. When he yelped, I told him it was God’s will."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I am not running down contraception; it’s the greatest boon to women in all history, as efficient contraception frees women from that automatic enslavement to men that has been the norm through all histories. But the ancient structure of our female nervous systems is not tuned to contraception; it is tuned to getting pregnant."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Father always required me to think for myself, and Mr. Clemens urged me to, also. I was taught that the one Unforgivable Sin, the offense against one’s own integrity, was to accept anything at all simply on authority."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape is never to let them find out."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"There is something about gold that has an effect on human judgment similar to that of heroin or cocaine."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Happiness,” Jubal stated, “lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.” “Really?” “That’s straight out of the Bible; you can look it up.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Serbia, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an otherwise useless piece of royalty, and to this day I have never been able to understand why this event could cause Germany to invade Belgium a month later."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Be a pessimist and you will hardly ever be wrong."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"You can’t do it all the time, but there is no limit to how much you can talk about it."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Professor Huxley introduced me to the fact that [[theology] is a study with no answers because it has no subject matter. No subject matter? That’s right, no subject matter whatever—just colored water with artificial sweetening."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"What is a “concrete” word? It is a spell-symbol used to tag something you can point to and thereby agree on, e. g., “cat,” “sailboat,” “ice-skating”—agree with such certainty that when you say “sailboat’’ there is no chance whatever that I will think you mean a furry quadruped with retractile claws. With the spell symbol “God” there is no way to achieve such agreement because there is nothing to point to."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Circular reasoning can’t get you out of this dilemma. Pointing to something (the physical world) and asserting that it has to have a Creator and this Creator necessarily has such-and-such attributes proves nothing save that you have made certain assertions without proof. You have pointed at a physical thing, the physical world; you have asserted that this thing has to have a “Creator” (Who told you that? What’s his mailing address? Who told him?). But to assert that something physical was created out of nothing—not even empty space—by a thingamajig you can’t point to is not to make a philosophical statement or any sort of statement, it is mere noise, amphigory, sound and fury signifying nothing. Jesuits take fourteen years to learn to talk that sort of nonsense. Southern fundamentalist preachers learn to talk it in a much shorter time. Either way, it’s nonsense."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But, like theology, metaphysics has no answers. Just questions. But what lovely questions!… Metaphysics has polysyllabic words for all of these ideas but you don’t have to use them; Anglo-Saxon monosyllables do just as well for questions that have no answers. Persons who claim to have answers to these questions invariably are fakers after your money. No exceptions. If you point out their fakery, if you dare to say aloud that the emperor has no clothes, they will lynch you if possible, always from the highest of motives."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I don’t understand time line three (code Neil Armstrong) so I had better quote Jubal Harshaw. who lived through it. “Mama Maureen,” he said to me, “the America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. Perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of other citizens…which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it…which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’ “‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. Jubal shrugged and looked sad. “Mine was a lovely world—until the parasites took over.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"America in my own time line suffered the cancer of “Bread and Circuses” but found a swifter way to commit suicide. I don’t boast about the difference, as in time line two the people of the United States succumbed to something even sillier than Bread and Circuses: the people voted themselves a religious dictatorship."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The potential for religious hysteria has always been present in the American culture, and this I knew, as my father had rubbed my nose in it from an early age. Father had pointed out to me that the only thing that preserved religious freedom in the United States was not the First Amendment and was not tolerance…but was solely a Mexican standoff between rival religious sects, each sect intolerant, each sect the sole custodian of the “One True Faith”—but each sect a minority that gave lip service to freedom of religion to keep its own “One True Faith” from being persecuted by all the other “True Faiths.”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Marriage is not a sometime thing; it’s whole hawg or you’re not married."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Population pressure works much like a rising river. You can put up dikes or levees, but the day comes when the river has to go somewhere."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. Nor does he feel guilt over breaking it. He simply follows the Eleventh Commandment."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But how many men are truly wise in their handling of women? In all history you can count them on the fingers of one thumb."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Gratitude”: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, “altruism.” Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Long ago Mr. Clemens demonstrated in his essay “What is man?” that every one of us acts at all times in his own interest. Once you understand this, it offers a way to negotiate with an antagonist in order to find means to cooperate with him for mutual benefit. But if you are convinced of your own “altruism” and you try to shame him out of his horrid selfishness, you will get nowhere."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Why don’t they modernize?” I answered, “Money. Donald, any question that starts out ‘Why don’t they—’ the answer is always ‘Money.’”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"A feature that struck my eye was an abundance of built-in bookcases…added later, it seemed to me, except a pair of small ones flanking the fireplace in the family room. Most houses didn’t even have that much, as most people don’t read. (Before the twentieth century was out that could be worded, “—most people can’t read.” One of the things I learned in studying the histories of my home planet and century on various time lines was that in the decline and fall that took place on every one of them there was one invariant: illiteracy. In addition to that scandalous flaw, on three time lines were both drug abuse and concurrent crime in the streets, plus a corrupt and spendthrift government. My own time line had endless psychotic fads followed by religious frenzy; time line seven had continuous wars; three time lines had collapse of family life and marriage—but every time line had loss of literacy…combined with—riddle me this—more money per student spent on education than ever before in each history. Never were so many paid so much for accomplishing so little. By 1980 the teachers themselves were only semiliterate.)"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Father had told me, “Widows are far better than brides. They don’t tell, they won’t yell, they don’t swell, they rarely smell, and they’re grateful as hell."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“I don’t recommend disturbing either corpses or golfers.” “There’s a difference?”"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Eventually I learned that the Church is run solely for the benefit of the priesthood, not for the good of our people. But I learned it too late."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The few VIPs I’ve met struck me as hollow shells, animated by PR men."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I am not much interested in killing strangers. I am not opposed to the death penalty—I voted for it every time the matter came to a vote, which was frequently during the decline and fall of the United States—but in killing pour le sport I need to be emotionally involved. Oh, forced to a choice I would rather shoot a man than a deer; I can’t see the “sport” and shooting a gentle vegetarian that can’t shoot back. But, given full choice, I would rather watch television than kill a stranger. Some, at least."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important…so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“But every man is entitled to his own opinion!” Perhaps. Certainly every man had his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly. On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene. The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion. On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God. In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason. “But you must respect another man’s religious beliefs!” For Heaven’s sake, why? Stupid is stupid—faith doesn’t make it smart. I recall one candidate’s promise that I heard during the presidential campaign of 1976, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality head skidded. “We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes!” Nobody laughed."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Leave it to “worthy causes”? That is thin gruel, my friend. Most of such money is sopped up by administration, i.e., eaten by parasites."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Males are conservative about sex, especially those who think they are not."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"An erection is the most flattering compliment a man can pay to an older woman."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"One thing in those memoirs made me proud of my “naughty” son: He seems to have been always incapable of abandoning wife and child. Since (in my opinion) much of the decay that led to the decline and fall of the United States had to do with males who shrugged off their duty to pregnant women and young children, I found myself willing to forgive my “bad boy” for all his foibles since he never wavered in this prime virtue. A male must be willing to live and die for his female and their cubs…else he is nothing."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is not sadistic; it is hard common sense. You fail your children worst if you do not punish them when they need it. The lessons you fail to teach them will be taught later and much more harshly by a cruel world, the real world where no excuses are accepted."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We take just one vow, to safeguard the welfare and happiness of all our children. That’s our total marriage contract. The rest is just poetic ritual."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"How long has this racket been going on?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I expect this to be my last venture in this field; 'tain't worth the grief"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Criminals are never materially handicapped by such rules; the only effect is to disarm the peaceful citizen and put him fully at the mercy of the lawless. Such rules look very pretty on paper; in practice they are as foolish and footless as the attempt of the mice to bell the cat. Such is my thesis, that the licensing of weapons is subversive of liberty and self-defeating in its pious purpose."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One. If we don't change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we're going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we're going to spread. I don't know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I'm an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it's utterly inevitable: we're going to spread through the entire universe."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Pretentiousness and incompetence, like indecisiveness, disloyalty, and incivility, were objects of his contempt."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"After all, various of his own opinions had evolved with time and experience, as they will for anyone who is alive between the ears."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"YOUR INFLUENCE ON US ALL, FROM 1939 ON, CANNOT BE MEASURED. I CAN ONLY SAY I REMEMBER, WARMLY, YOUR MANY KINDNESSES TO ME WHEN I WAS 19–20–21 YEARS OLD. THAT YOUNG MAN BASKED IN YOUR LIGHT AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR THE HELP YOU OFFERED WHEN I WAS SO POOR & NEEDFUL!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him — one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"In terms of the future, my Anishinaabemowin language has a word, kobade—a very small word, but in reality an extremely sophisticated concept. The idea is that everything that’s in the past and the future is also in the now, but it’s not as simplistic as that. It’s more like there exists a spiral of intergenerational connections, so that even if you are in the present you have spirit persons at your side; they can be ancient spirits, considered to be from the past or from the future. Kobade is the recognition of all persons, not just human persons, and of all the intergenerational connections that we have, which are never linear, but spiral. In my language some people may describe it as a chain, wherein we’re connected to each other, so that the future is always containing the past and the present; I don’t use the word “chain” because I work in Black Studies and it just feels heavy and inappropriate. I use the image of a spiral. This is very different from the former science fiction model, what was called “extrapolative fiction.” This word came directly from Robert A. Heinlein, who took the idea from mathematical equations, where you pull something out of the past or the present and draw this imagined plausible future from one dot to another. That’s an extremely linear concept, too simplistic to allow other forms of thinking. For example, we just don’t arbitrarily choose a certain point in the past when writing and developing characters; there can be all kinds of remnants of pasts, presents, and futures."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Look at somebody like Heinlein: many of his late books are just tirades."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Heinlein presents us, in terms of his sources and influences with a rope of many strands and the strength of the whole is in the multiplicity of the strands. To lift one strand out and examine it has two immediate effects: it magnifies the relative importance out of proportion to its place in the whole; and it weakens the whole. For all the good and interesting use Heinlein made of his encounter with Cabell, he was not a disciple or even a "Cabell minor." Rather, he used Cabellian materials to make his own figure in the world, and in so doing he has given the Biography of the Life of Manuel a Life of its own, flowing into literary history. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery — but in literature, transformation is the only form of progeny."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"I found Robert A. Heinlein in back issues of Astounding, and also in The Saturday Evening Post, and I read everything of his I could find. I was completely hooked on his "juveniles": Space Cadet. Red Planet. Starman Jones. Between Planets. Farmer in the Sky. Wonderful stories, and the only thing "juvenile" about them was that he took the trouble to explain what was happening. Robert once told me that young people want to know how things work, and you can tell them more in a "juvenile" than you can in an adult novel. In any event I devoured everything of his I could find, through high school, the army, college, and I couldn’t have cared less that many were "juveniles". They were wonderful. I met Robert Heinlein years later, and through some kind of rare magic we became instant friends. We corresponded for a decade. In those days I was an engineering psychologist, operations research specialist, and systems engineer in aerospace. Most of my work was military aerospace, but I did get to work on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We were helping to make the dream come true! I went from there to a professorship, and then into political management and city government. Robert visited me when I was working for Mayor Sam Yorty. "You probably don’t know this," he said, "but my political career ended when Yorty beat me for the Democratic nomination to the State Assembly." When I finally decided to get out of politics, academia, and the aerospace industry and try my hand at writing, Mr. Heinlein was enormously helpful. Years later, when I was an established writer, I asked him how I could pay him back. "You can’t," he said. "You don’t pay back, you pay forward." I never forgot that, just as I never forgot the wonderful things his ‘juvenile’ stories did for me."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Free speech gives people the right to knock who and what I love; it also gives me the right to rebut."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"If you mean he believes the wise should rule the foolish and the competent rule the incompetent, again I plead guilty to the same offense. Somebody’s got to drive—should it not be the best driver?"

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"He pronounces himself dismayed not only by political events of the last few decades, but by the terrifying decay of education and growth of irrationalism in America."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The fourth notion drawn in the works of Heinlein, something which again may seem unpopular today, is the idea that competence is good. There’s nothing wrong with being a polymath. You don’t have to be bad at one thing, you can be good at many things. When you read Heinlein, he doesn’t write about idiots, fumbling their inadequate way through the world to achieve nothing. And why should he? Others are doing that. Too many novels today have as their message: “Let me take you in this book from the squalid, dull, and meaningless life that you live, to the squalid, dull, and meaningless life that I live. Heinlein would have none of that. He believed that there is nothing wrong with being competent."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Heinlein stories also say that there are in this world (and all others) good guys and bad guys, and the good guys will finally win, and the bad guys, driven by greed or vanity or hate or lust for power, should and will finally lose. This is a moral position, and Heinlein’s works never lack morality (which, as he clearly pointed out, has little or nothing to do with the conventional definition of morals, so often preoccupied as they are with the sexual customs of a particular age)."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"The people of every nation want to make their country cleaner, stronger, and a better place for the next generation. The quality of patriotism in its finer form is seen in every land around the world. As Robert Heinlein often made clear, it should not be confused with imperialism, which is conceptually its opposite, nor with a refusal to listen to criticism. Patriots listen to and evaluate all criticism; but they make up their own minds. This idea, of thoughtful independence and loyalty to one’s own kind (species, nation, town, and family) runs through the corpus of Heinlein writing."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"Above all, Heinlein taught us to accept his wisdom without becoming followers. He taught us to become, and to remain, individuals. … The Libertarian movement must go far to prove itself, but it may prove to be the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak era. The shadow of two powerful minds cast themselves over everything about that movement, whether we recognize it or not: the minds of Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein. … What Heinlein gave it, no less vital if we’re to effect the changes we aspire to, was heart the guts."

- Robert A. Heinlein

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"We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behavior; and that our behavior has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We're told every day, "You can't change the world." But the world is changing every day. Only question is … who's doing it? You or somebody else?"

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks the use of an angelic (or seemingly angelic character), whose likes have been written about for, oh, about 4,000 years, is ripping off Star Trek, has his head so thoroughly up his ass as to have blipped into an entirely new intestinally-based reality and desperately needs to get a wider frame of reference."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"Even Zathras say, Braves suck."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"They told us not to wish in the first place, not to aspire, not to try; to be quiet, to play nice, to shoot low and aspire not at all. They are always wrong. Follow your dreams. Make your wishes. Create the future. And above all, believe in yourself. That is the lesson of Babylon 5."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"I think it behooves us to treat our characters' beliefs with some measure of respect, whatever he believes in. I mean I'm an atheist myself, but I don't have to believe in Minbari to write about Minbari. I think if that person is a religious character, then you have to treat them with integrity and deal with them properly. As a result, this show is very popular with a lot of religious folks."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"I like to consider my mind an open door. It's just not a revolving door."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"Your assumption, and the truth, dine at totally separate tables."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever. No afterlives, no second chances, no backsies. So there can be nothing crueler than the abuse, destruction or wanton taking of a life. It is a crime no less than burning the Mona Lisa, for there is always just one of each. So I cannot forgive."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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": Bereft of my technology... mystic armor damaged... offensive and defensive capabilities minimal. Enemy forces... [a horde of demons closes in] substantial. It matters not. Even cornered, to my last breath I remain who and what I am. I will not hide, nor tremble, nor beg. Let them come and reckon with fury that is DOOM defiant. Here I stand, hell-horde! Unbowed! But understand: If it is my destiny that I should perish this day, I shall not go down easily... and I shall NOT go down ALONE. Demons: RIP its SKIN. Wear it for HIDE. Its EYES for me. Tear its FLESH from its BONES. Doctor Doom: Yes, come, and let us make an end of it — there is DOOM enough for ALL!"

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"The more important the emotion is, the fewer words required to express it: Will you go out with me? I think I like you. I care for you. I love you. Marry me. Goodbye."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"You can't let the outside world, or your perception of yourself in it, affect the work; that way madness lies. The only correct approach is to ensure that whatever you write, whenever you write it, you strive to make it better than the last thing you wrote."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"Stun settings are for people who can't commit."

- J. Michael Straczynski

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"One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play, long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's leading ladies, and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dream."

- Roger Ebert

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"When I think about the kinds of movies that make me cry, that make tears come to my eyes, I usually don't think about sad films. Sad films, I sort of just look at it. It's movies that are about selflessness, that are about sacrifice, about humans that believe in the good of the human race that sometimes move me."

- Roger Ebert

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"Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels."

- Roger Ebert

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"Well, what is a political film? A film about politicians? Or a film about issues — sexism, racism, the environment, nuclear policy? I decided on the broader definition. If I'd limited myself to films about politicians, it would have been a short list: How many characters in any mainstream American movie seem aware of the political process, or belong to a party?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly."

- Roger Ebert

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"I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."

- Roger Ebert

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"Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else."

- Roger Ebert

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"Many moviegoers and video viewers say they do not "like" black and white films. In my opinion, they are cutting themselves off from much of the mystery and beauty of the movies. Black and white is an artistic choice, a medium that has strengths and traditions, especially in its use of light and shadow. Moviegoers of course have the right to dislike b&w, but it is not something they should be proud of. It reveals them, frankly, as cinematically illiterate. I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste."

- Roger Ebert

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"A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise."

- Roger Ebert

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"I didn't have a stop watch, but it seemed to me the elephantine action scenes were pretty much spaced out evenly through the movie. There was no starting out slow and building up to a big climax. The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots® and Decepticons® must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like."

- Roger Ebert

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"I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization."

- Roger Ebert

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"I wear a pedometer, a little device that counts every step. It works as a goad, because you walk additional distances to pile up the numbers. The average person walks 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. I walk 10,000 steps a day. I have lost a lot of weight as a result."

- Roger Ebert

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"The Golden Thumb is not as good as the Oscar, but it is a lot of fun."

- Roger Ebert

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"I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic — the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win."

- Roger Ebert

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"For 40 years, I didn't miss a single deadline, but since July, I have missed every one. I also, to my intense disappointment, missed the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. Having just written my first review since June (The Queen), I think an update is in order."

- Roger Ebert

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"I have discovered a goodness and decency in people as exhibited in all the letters, e-mails, flowers, gifts and prayers that have been directed my way. I am overwhelmed and humbled. I offer you my most sincere thanks and my deep and abiding gratitude. If I ever write my memoirs, I have some spellbinding material. How does the Joni Mitchell song go? "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? One thing I've discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!"

- Roger Ebert

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"I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

- Roger Ebert

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"Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star."

- Roger Ebert

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"It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression."

- Roger Ebert

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"I support freedom of choice. My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born."

- Roger Ebert

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"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear... My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris."

- Roger Ebert

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"I must slow down now, which is why I'm taking what I like to call "a leave of presence." What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review. … So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies."

- Roger Ebert

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"Dr. Strangeloves humor is generated by a basic comic principle: People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing. The laughs have to seem forced on unwilling characters by the logic of events. A man wearing a funny hat is not funny. But if the man doesn't know he's wearing a funny hat--now you've got something. The characters in Dr. Strangelove do not know their hats are funny."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes for it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornados, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising, how without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness. Because he was funny, because he wore a porkpie hat, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued … no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own."

- Roger Ebert

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"Magnolia is a film of sadness and loss, of lifelong bitterness, of children harmed and adults destroying themselves. As the narrator tells us near the end, "We may be through with the past, but the past is never through with us." In this wreckage of lifetimes, there are two figures, a policeman and a nurse, who do what they can to offer help, hope and love. … The central theme is cruelty to children, and its lasting effect. This is closely linked to a loathing or fear of behaving as we are told, or think, that we should. … As an act of filmmaking, it draws us in and doesn't let go. It begins deceptively, with a little documentary about amazing coincidences (including the scuba diver scooped by a fire-fighting plane and dumped on a forest fire) … coincidences and strange events do happen, and they are as real as everything else. If you could stand back far enough, in fact, everything would be revealed as a coincidence. What we call "coincidences" are limited to the ones we happen to notice. … In one beautiful sequence, Anderson cuts between most of the major characters all simultaneously singing Aimee Mann's "It's Not Going to Stop." A directorial flourish? You know what? I think it's a coincidence. Unlike many other "hypertext movies" with interlinking plots, Magnolia seems to be using the device in a deeper, more philosophical way. Anderson sees these people joined at a level below any possible knowledge, down where fate and destiny lie. They have been joined by their actions and their choices. And all leads to the remarkable, famous, sequence near the film's end when it rains frogs. Yes. Countless frogs, still alive, all over Los Angeles, falling from the sky. That this device has sometimes been joked about puzzles me. I find it a way to elevate the whole story into a larger realm of inexplicable but real behavior. We need something beyond the human to add another dimension. Frogs have rained from the sky eight times this century, but never mind the facts. Attend instead to Exodus 8:2, which is cited on a placard in the film: "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite your whole territory with frogs." Let who go? In this case, I believe, it refers not to people, but to fears, shames, sins. Magnolia is one of those rare films that works in two entirely different ways. In one sense, it tells absorbing stories, filled with detail, told with precision and not a little humor. On another sense, it is a parable. The message of the parable, as with all good parables, is expressed not in words but in emotions. After we have felt the pain of these people, and felt the love of the policeman and the nurse, we have been taught something intangible, but necessary to know."

- Roger Ebert

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"I began my work as a film critic in 1967. I had not thought to be a film critic, and indeed had few firm career plans apart from vague notions that I might someday be a political columnist or a professor of English. Robert Zonka, who was named the paper's feature editor the same day I was hired at the Chicago Sun-Times, became one of the best friends of a lifetime. One day in March 1967, he called me into a conference room, told me that Eleanor Keen, the paper's movie critic, was retiring, and that I was the new critic. I walked away in elation and disbelief, yet hardly suspected that this day would set the course for the rest of my life."

- Roger Ebert

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"In my very first review I was already jaded, observing of "Galia," an obscure French film, that it "opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." My pose in those days was one of superiority to the movies, although just when I had the exact angle of condescension calculated, a movie would open that disarmed my defenses and left me ecstatic and joyful."

- Roger Ebert

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"Herzog by his example gave me a model for the film artist: fearless, driven by his subjects, indifferent to commercial considerations, trusting his audience to follow him anywhere. In the 38 years since I saw my first Herzog film, after an outpouring of some 50 features and documentaries, he has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular."

- Roger Ebert

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"Some of these reviews were written in joyous zeal. Others with glee. Some in sorrow, some in anger, and a precious few with venom, of which I have a closely guarded supply. When I am asked, all too frequently, if I really sit all the way through these movies, my answer is inevitably: Yes, because I want to write the review. I would guess that I have not mentioned my Pulitzer Prize in a review except once or twice since 1975, but at the moment I read Rob Schneider's extremely unwise open letter to Patrick Goldstein, I knew I was receiving a home-run pitch, right over the plate. Other reviews were written in various spirits, some of them almost benevolently, but of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, all I can say is that it is a movie made to inspire the title of a book like this."

- Roger Ebert

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"I lay awake wondering how I could pray for faith to a God I could not believe in without faith. That seemed to leave me suspended between two questions. These logical puzzles were generated spontaneously within my mind. They didn’t come from my school or my family. Most of my neighborhood friends were Protestants who were not interested in theories about God, apart from the fact that of course he existed. I bought the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church lock, stock, and barrel, apart from the God problem."

- Roger Ebert

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"For many years I visualized the Soviet Union as a land where the sun never came out and enslaved Catholic peasants labored under lowering skies for their godless rulers. But our theology was often very practical: All men are created equal. Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Follow the Ten Commandments, which we studied at length, except for adultery, “which you children don’t have to worry about.”"

- Roger Ebert

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"As I grew I no longer lost any sleep over the questions of God and infinity. I understood they could have no answers. At some point the reality of God was no longer present in my mind. I believed in the basic Church teachings because I thought they were correct, not because God wanted me to. In my mind, in the way I interpret them, I still live by them today. Not by the rules and regulations, but by the principles. For example, in the matter of abortion, I am pro-choice, but by personal choice would have nothing to do with an abortion of a child of my own. I believe in free will, and believe I have no right to tell anyone else what to do. Popes come and go, and John XXIII has been the only one I felt affection for. Their dictums strike me as lacking in the ability to surprise. They have been leading a holding action for a millennium."

- Roger Ebert

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"Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them if it wasn’t so secular. Then I want to ask, “Why do you think it is secular?” This would lead to my opinion that their beliefs were not humanist."

- Roger Ebert

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"Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God disappeared. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a nonpracticing Lutheran, until a deathbed conversion that rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake. Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category that people can apply to me. Those who say that “believer” and “atheist” are concrete categories do violence to the mystery we must be humble enough to confess. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word."

- Roger Ebert

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"Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist — which I am."

- Roger Ebert

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"Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. That’s for them to believe. I don’t believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general has a need to believe in higher powers and an existence not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn’t make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social. I’ve spent hours and hours in churches all over the world. I sit in them not to pray, but to gently nudge my thoughts toward wonder and awe. I am aware of the generations there before me and the reassurance of tradition."

- Roger Ebert

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"I have no patience for churches that evangelize aggressively. I have no interest in being instructed in what I must do to be saved. I prefer vertical prayer, directed up toward heaven, rather than horizontal prayer, directed sideways toward me. I believe a worthy church must grow through attraction, not promotion. I am wary of zealotry; even as a child I was suspicious of those who, as I often heard, were “more Catholic than the pope.” If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must regard their beliefs with the same respect our own deserve."

- Roger Ebert

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"That the universe, as was once thought, expands and contracts indefinitely, one Big Bang collapsing into another one, seemed reasonable enough. But in both models of the universe, what caused the first Big Bang? Or was there a first Big Bang, any more than a last number? If there was a first cause, was there a first causer? Did Big Bangs just happen to happen? Can we name the first causer “God”? We can name it anything we want. I can name it after myself. It is utterly insignificant what it is called, because we would be giving a name to something that falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge. So naming it is a futile enterprise. The word “God” is unhelpful because it implies it has a knowable definition."

- Roger Ebert

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"Quantum theory is now discussing instantaneous connections between two entangled quantum objects such as electrons. This phenomenon has been observed in laboratory experiments and scientists believe they have proven it takes place. They’re not talking about faster than the speed of light. Speed has nothing to do with it. The entangled objects somehow communicate instantaneously at a distance. If that is true, distance has no meaning. Light-years have no meaning. Space has no meaning. In a sense, the entangled objects are not even communicating. They are the same thing. At the “quantum level” (and I don’t know what that means), everything may be actually or theoretically linked. All is one. Sun, moon, stars, rain, you, me, everything. All one. If this is so, then Buddhism must have been a quantum theory all along. No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers."

- Roger Ebert

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"Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in."

- Roger Ebert

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"Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”"

- Roger Ebert

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""Kindness" covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."

- Roger Ebert

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"Why did they give an R rating to a movie perfect for teenagers?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Old age isn't for sissies, and neither is this film. … This is now. We are filled with optimism and expectation. Why would we want to see such a film, however brilliantly it has been made? I think it's because a film like Amour has a lesson for us that only the cinema can teach: the cinema, with its heedless ability to leap across time and transcend lives and dramatize what it means to be a member of humankind's eternal audience."

- Roger Ebert

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"Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron's film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his Titanic was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely."

- Roger Ebert

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"Especially in its opening scenes, Ballast is "slower" and "quieter" than we usually expect. You know what? So is life, most of the time. We don't wake up and immediately start engaging with plot points. But Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people."

- Roger Ebert

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"I said this is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There's something to it."

- Roger Ebert

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"Dances With Wolves has the kind of vision and ambition that is rare in movies today. It is not a formula movie, but a thoughtful, carefully observed story. It is a Western at a time when the Western is said to be dead. It asks for our imagination and sympathy. It takes its time, three hours, to unfold. It is a personal triumph for Kevin Costner, the intelligent young actor of Field of Dreams, who directed the film and shows a command of story and of visual structure that is startling; this movie moves so confidently and looks so good it seems incredible that it's a directorial debut."

- Roger Ebert

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"Admiration I did not feel. Sympathy I felt in the sense that I would feel it for a rabid dog, while accepting that it must be destroyed. I do not feel the film provides "a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did," because I feel no film can, and no response would be sufficient. All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism."

- Roger Ebert

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"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about Basketball Diaries?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory." In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."

- Roger Ebert

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"Films like Fargo are why I love the movies."

- Roger Ebert

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"Groundhog Day is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is. Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn."

- Roger Ebert

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"A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says "Groundhog Day" is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, but never mind: They have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything." What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair. We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel."

- Roger Ebert

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"This is a film about — and also for — not only obsessed clerks in record stores, but the video store clerks who have seen all the movies, and the bookstore employees who have read all the books. Also for bartenders, waitresses, greengrocers in health food stores, kitchen slaves at vegetarian restaurants, the people at GNC who know all the herbs, writers for alternative weeklies, disc jockeys on college stations, salespeople in retro clothing shops, tattoo artists and those they tattoo, poets, artists, musicians, novelists, and the hip, the pierced and the lonely. They may not see themselves but they will recognize people they know."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. … "House of Sand and Fog" relates not a plot with its contrived ups and downs but a story. A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave. To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of House of Sand and Fog, we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires."

- Roger Ebert

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"Seated in a dark theater, I reached out my hand for that of my wife’s. She and I had visited the same beach and discussed visiting it with our children and grandchildren. An icy finger ran slowly down our spines. Such a connection can be terrifying. What does it mean? We are the playthings of the gods."

- Roger Ebert

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"The R rating refers to Logue's use of vulgarity. It is utterly inexplicable. This is an excellent film for teenagers."

- Roger Ebert

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"Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out. Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them."

- Roger Ebert

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"Empathy has been in short supply in our nation recently. Our leaders are quick to congratulate us on our own feelings, slow to ask us to wonder how others feel. But maybe times are changing. Every Lee film is an exercise in empathy. He is not interested in congratulating the black people in his audience, or condemning the white ones. He puts human beings on the screen, and asks his audience to walk a little while in their shoes."

- Roger Ebert

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"The Man in the Moon is like a great short story, one of those masterpieces of language and mood where not one word is wrong, or unnecessary. It flows so smoothly from start to finish that it hardly even seems like an ordinary film. Usually I am aware of the screenwriter putting in obligatory scenes. I can hear the machinery grinding. Not this time. Although, in retrospect, I can see how carefully the plot was put together, how meticulously each event was prepared for, as I watched the film I was only aware of life passing by."

- Roger Ebert

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"Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world. He shows what such an ordinary man can achieve. Milk was the right person in the right place at the right time, and he rose to the occasion. So was Rosa Parks. Sometimes, at a precise moment in history, all it takes is for one person to stand up. Or sit down."

- Roger Ebert

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"American movies are in the midst of a transition period. Some directors place their trust in technology. Spielberg, who is a master of technology, trusts only story and character, and then uses everything else as a workman uses his tools. He makes Minority Report with the new technology; other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it. This film is such a virtuoso high-wire act, daring so much, achieving it with such grace and skill. Minority Report reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place."

- Roger Ebert

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"What Charlize Theron achieves in Patty Jenkins' Monster isn't a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders. She does not excuse the murders. She simply asks that we witness the woman's final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended."

- Roger Ebert

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"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?"

- Roger Ebert

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"To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect."

- Roger Ebert

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"This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel."

- Roger Ebert

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"Once is the kind of film I've been pestered about ever since I started reviewing again. People couldn't quite describe it, but they said I had to see it. I had to. Well, I did. They were right."

- Roger Ebert

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"In the twilight of the 20th century, here is a comedy to reassure us that there is hope — that the world we see around us represents progress, not decay. Pleasantville, which is one of the year's best and most original films, sneaks up on us. It begins by kidding those old black-and-white sitcoms like "Father Knows Best," it continues by pretending to be a sitcom itself, and it ends as a social commentary of surprising power. … The film observes that sometimes pleasant people are pleasant simply because they have never, ever been challenged. That it's scary and dangerous to learn new ways. The movie is like the defeat of the body snatchers: The people in color are like former pod people now freed to move on into the future. We observe that nothing creates fascists like the threat of freedom. Pleasantville is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom. I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of Pleasantville than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for."

- Roger Ebert

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"Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again... This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind."

- Roger Ebert

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"Sometimes when you've read the novel, it gets in the way of the images on the screen. You keep remembering how you imagined things. That didn't happen with me during Sophie's Choice, because the movie is so perfectly cast and well-imagined that it just takes over and happens to you. It's quite an experience. … The movie becomes an act of discovery, as the naive young American, his mind filled with notions of love, death, and honor, becomes the friend of a woman who has seen so much hate, death, and dishonor that the only way she can continue is by blotting out the past, and drinking and loving her way into temporary oblivion. … Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them."

- Roger Ebert

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"Here is a lovely film about two high school seniors who look, speak and feel like real 18-year-old middle-American human beings. Do you have any idea how rare that is? They aren't crippled by irony. They aren't speeded up into cartoons. Their sex lives aren't insulted by scenes that treat them cheaply. The story requires them to make love, but it doesn't insist we see her tits."

- Roger Ebert

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"Films like Speed belong to the genre I call Bruised Forearm Movies, because you're always grabbing the arm of the person sitting next to you. Done wrong, they seem like tired replays of old chase cliches. Done well, they're fun. Done as well as Speed, they generate a kind of manic exhilaration."

- Roger Ebert

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"We are connected with some people and never meet others, but it could easily have happened otherwise. Looking back over a lifetime, we describe what happened as if it had a plan. To fully understand how accidental and random life is — how vast the odds are against any single event taking place — would be humbling. … This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be."

- Roger Ebert

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"Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling. … I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of The Tree of Life reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me. If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick's gift, it would look so much like this. … There is a father who maintains discipline and a mother who exudes forgiveness, and long summer days of play and idleness and urgent unsaid questions about the meaning of things. … The film's portrait of everyday life, inspired by Malick's memories of his hometown of Waco, Texas, is bounded by two immensities, one of space and time, and the other of spirituality. The Tree of Life has awe-inspiring visuals suggesting the birth and expansion of the universe, the appearance of life on a microscopic level and the evolution of species. This process leads to the present moment, and to all of us. We were created in the Big Bang and over untold millions of years, molecules formed themselves into, well, you and me. And what comes after? In whispered words near the beginning, "nature" and "grace" are heard. … The film's coda provides a vision of an afterlife, a desolate landscape on which quiet people solemnly recognize and greet one another, and all is understood in the fullness of time."

- Roger Ebert

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"It is not too soon for "United 93," because it is not a film that knows any time has passed since 9/11. The entire story, every detail, is told in the present tense. We know what they know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold. This is a masterful and heartbreaking film, and it does honor to the memory of the victims."

- Roger Ebert

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"Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God's Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention to detail when they go to the movies. They don't miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten children's movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that's why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids' movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn't they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn't going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child's mind, I think. All of this is preface to a simple statement: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is probably the best film of its sort since "The Wizard of Oz." It is everything that family movies usually claim to be, but aren't: Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and, most of all, a genuine work of imagination. Willy Wonka is such a surely and wonderfully spun fantasy that it works on all kinds of minds, and it is fascinating because, like all classic fantasy, it is fascinated with itself."

- Roger Ebert

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"The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together."

- Roger Ebert

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"Burt and Verona are two characters rarely seen in the movies: thirtysomething, educated, healthy, self-employed, gentle, thoughtful, whimsical, not neurotic and really truly in love. Their great concern is finding the best place and way to raise their child, who is a bun still in the oven. For every character like this I’ve seen in the last 12 months, I’ve seen 20, maybe 30, mass murderers."

- Roger Ebert

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"Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it."

- Roger Ebert

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"Rarely has a movie this expensive provided so many quotable lines."

- Roger Ebert

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"Anna’s reaction is more complex than you might imagine, and it’s at such a moment you appreciate the woman in the writer-director’s chair. Women, I suspect, are more likely than men to view sex from the over-all perspective of what we may call their lives. In a country like Saudi Arabia, whose citizens express discomfort about men and women even attending movies together, I have little doubt which gender is more concerned."

- Roger Ebert

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"[W]hat Husbands and Wives argues is that many "rational" relationships are actually not as durable as they seem, because somewhere inside every person is a child crying me! me! me! We say we want the other person to be happy. What we mean is, we want them to be happy with us, just as we are, on our terms... Beneath the urgency of all the older characters - both men, both women, and even the older dating partners they experiment with - is the realization that life is short, that time is running out, that life sells you a romantic illusion and neglects to tell you that you can't have it, because when you take any illusion and make it flesh, its hair begins to fall out, and it has B.O., and it asks you what your sign is. True love involves loving another's imperfections, which are the parts that tend to endure."

- Roger Ebert

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"It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time."

- Roger Ebert

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"After seeing Orphan, I now realize that Damien of The Omen was a model child. The Demon Seed was a bumper crop. Rosemary would have been happy to have this baby. Do not, under any circumstances, take children to see it. Take my word on this."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie delights me with its cocky confidence that the audience can keep up. Primer is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who 'go to the movies to be entertained', and embraced and debated by others, who will find it entertains the parts the others do not reach."

- Roger Ebert

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"Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced — because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival."

- Roger Ebert

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"It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others — so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people.""

- Roger Ebert

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"This movie was made by professionals. Do not attempt any of this behavior yourself."

- Roger Ebert

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"Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?There will be many who find "To the Wonder" elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need."

- Roger Ebert

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"To call it weird would be a cowardly evasion. It is creepy, eccentric, eerie, flaky, freaky, funky, grotesque, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, oddball, spooky, uncanny, uncouth and unearthly. Especially uncouth. What I did was, I typed the word 'weird' and when that wholly failed to evoke the feelings the film stirred in me, I turned to the thesaurus and it suggested the above substitutes - and none of them do the trick, either."

- Roger Ebert

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"[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations — when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens."

- Roger Ebert

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"It is an interesting law of romance that a truly strong woman will choose a strong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along. Strength demands intelligence, intelligence demands stimulation, and weakness is boring. It is better to find a partner you can contend with for a lifetime than one who accommodates you because he doesn't really care. … Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. … Spill the beans, and the conversation is history. Speak in code, with wit and challenge, and the process of decryption is like foreplay."

- Roger Ebert

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"Is xXx a threat to the Bond franchise? Not a threat so much as a salute. I don't want James Bond to turn crude and muscular on me; I like the suave style. But I like Xander, too, especially since he seems to have studied Bond so very carefully."

- Roger Ebert

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"I wonder who will find the film more uncomfortable - men or women? Both will recoil from the brutality of the scenes of the assault. But for some men, the movie will reveal a truth that most women already know. It is that verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence - one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society."

- Roger Ebert

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"As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not."

- Roger Ebert

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"One hopeful sign that the filmmakers can learn and grow is that the sequel does not contain a single pie, if you know what I mean."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... is the movie vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature."

- Roger Ebert

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"The beautiful Monique insists on joining their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has a nefarious motive, but no, she's probably taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that the film requires a sexy female lead. This could be the first case in cinematic history of a character voluntarily entering a movie because of the objective fact that she is required."

- Roger Ebert

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"...it is widely but wrongly believed that Beavis and Butt-Head celebrates its characters, and applauds their sublime lack of values, taste and intelligence. I've never thought so. I believe Mike Judge would rather die than share a taxi ride to the airport with his characters — that for him, B&B function like Dilbert's co-workers in the Scott Adams universe. They are a target for his anger against the rising tide of stupidity."

- Roger Ebert

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"This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise," which I could call a "Love Affair" for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored. The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers."

- Roger Ebert

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"Censors feel they are safe from objectionable material but must protect others who are not as smart or moral. The same impulse tempts the reviewer of 'The Believer'... If the wrong people get the wrong message - well, there has never been any shortage of wrong messages. Or wrong people."

- Roger Ebert

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"I missed the enormously popular movie that introduced these characters, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and felt myself blessed at the time. But now I'm not so sure. Their Bogus Journey is a riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones. It's the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick."

- Roger Ebert

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"In Blue Crush, we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions."

- Roger Ebert

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"Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store."

- Roger Ebert

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"This film is based on an actual 2004 event that took place at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky. Google it and you'll find most of the same details. If you're not one of the film's walk-outs, you'll discover at the end that 70 similar deceptions have occurred in the United States... If the stunt worked 70 times, they must prove something — perhaps that we are afraid of authority. I know that when a traffic cop pulls me over, I'm frightened — scared enough that I drive safely and am almost never pulled over."

- Roger Ebert

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"...If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it's that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails."

- Roger Ebert

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"I read all the movie reviews, especially those of Ebert, a graceful and witty prose stylist with profound erudition, whose reviews are worth reading just for themselves, whether or not I have any intention of viewing the movie … Ebert, the smart and handsome one, gave thumbs up to my first movie [Garfield: The Movie], but [[w:Richard Roeper|[Richard] Roeper]], the other one, gave thumbs down and was particularly unkind. He went on forever attacking Ebert for liking Garfield. This from a man with enough taste to praise Duma. How very disappointing. One of Roeper's complaints was that I was animated and all of the other characters in the movie were "real." Do you have any idea how a statement like that hurts an actor who has worked all of his life as a media cat? Yes, Richard Roeper, I was animated. Read my lips: I am a character in a comic strip."

- Roger Ebert

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"I arrive at the end of this review having done my duty as a critic. I have described the movie accurately and you have a good idea what you are in for if you go to see it. Most of you will not. I cannot argue with you. Some of you will — the brave and the curious. You embody the spirit of the man who first wondered what it would taste like to eat an oyster."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's strange: We leave the movie having enjoyed its conclusion so much that we almost forgot our earlier reservations. But they were there, and they were real."

- Roger Ebert

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"Formula comedies are a dime a dozen. Those based on an original idea are more rare, and Groundhog Day, apart from everything else, is a demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break. Just because we're born as SOBs doesn't mean we have to live that way."

- Roger Ebert

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"You should never send an expert to a movie about his specialty. Boxers hate boxing movies. Space buffs said 'Apollo 13' showed the wrong side of the moon. The British believe Mel Gibson's scholarship was faulty in 'Braveheart' merely because some of the key characters hadn't been born at the time of the story. 'Hackers' is, I have no doubt, deeply dubious in the computer science department. While it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie."

- Roger Ebert

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"Most people choose movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds."

- Roger Ebert

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"The charm of a Kevin Smith movie is that it assumes you do not enter the theater as a blank slate. "Chasing Amy" assumes a little knowledge of the world of serious comic books and collectors; "Dogma" required you to know something about Catholic theology, and "Jay and Silent Bob" has moments like the one where the Affleck character defines the Internet for Jay: "It's a place used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography together." This is a much more sophisticated idea of the Net than we find in high-tech cyberthrillers, where the Net is a place that makes your computer beep a lot. Whether you will like "Jay and Silent Bob" depends on who you are. Most movies are made for everybody. Kevin Smith's movies are either made specifically for you, or specifically not made for you. If you read this review without a smile or a nod of recognition, I would recommend "Rush Hour 2," which is for everybody or nobody, you tell me."

- Roger Ebert

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"These days too many children's movies are infected by the virus of Winning, as if kids are nothing more than underage pro athletes, and the values of Vince Lombardi prevail: It's not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose. This is a movie that breaks with that tradition, that allows its kids to be kids, that shows them in the insular world of imagination and dreaming that children create entirely apart from adult domains and values. There was a moment in the film when Rodriguez hit a line drive directly at the pitcher's mound, and I ducked and held up my mitt, and then I realized I didn't have a mitt, and it was then I also realized how completely this movie had seduced me with its memories of what really matters when you are 12."

- Roger Ebert

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"I recently published a book about movies I hated, and people have been asking me which reviews are harder to write — those about great movies, or those about terrible ones. The answer is neither. The most unreviewable movies are those belonging to the spoof genre — movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun and all the countless spin-offs and retreads of the same basic idea... the bottom line in reviewing a movie like this is, does it work? Is it funny? Yes, it is. Not funny with the shocking impact of Airplane! which had the advantage of breaking new ground. But also not a tired wheeze like some of the lesser and later Leslie Nielsen films. To get your money's worth, you need to be familiar with the various teenage horror franchises, and if you are, Scary Movie delivers the goods."

- Roger Ebert

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"What did I think about this movie? As a film critic, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the self-aware characters. At the same time, I was aware of the incredible level of gore in this film. It is *really* violent. Is the violence defused by the ironic way the film uses it and comments on it? For me, it was. For some viewers, it will not be, and they will be horrified. Which category do you fall in? Here's an easy test: When I mentioned Fangoria, did you know what I was talking about?"

- Roger Ebert

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"The star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman (1978) is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. In the same way, if American Beauty gets four stars, then [The United States of] Leland clocks in at about two."

- Roger Ebert

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"Khan is played as a cauldron of resentment by Ricardo Montalban, and his performance is so strong that he helps illustrate a general principle involving not only Star Trek but Star Wars and all the epic serials, especially the James Bond movies: Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph."

- Roger Ebert

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"Wild Things is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's the kind of movie where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, "Well, it was well made," and then they wince."

- Roger Ebert

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"No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11."

- Roger Ebert

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"Is that a sacrilege that I praise a Holocaust movie [Schindler's List] for being entertaining? The word doesn't imply that a movie need be cheerful. In my mind, entertainment in this genre springs from characters who are brought to full life, who we care about and who are set in a powerful story. My motto: "No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.""

- Roger Ebert

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"A movie should present its characters with a problem and then watch them solve it, not without difficulty. So says an old and reliable screenplay formula. Countless movies have been made about a boy and a girl who have a problem (they haven't slept with each other) and after difficulties (family, war, economic, health, rival lover, stupid misunderstanding) they solve it by sleeping with each other. Now we have a movie about two homosexuals that follows the same reliable convention."

- Roger Ebert

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""The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life."

- Roger Ebert

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"I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth."

- Roger Ebert

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"I do not demand that all movies have a story to pull us from beginning to end, and indeed one of the charms of The Big Lebowski, the Coens' previous film, is how its stoned hero loses track of the thread of his own life. But with O Brother, Where Are Thou? I had the sense of invention set adrift; of a series of bright ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the same film."

- Roger Ebert

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"Now that we know Quentin Tarantino can make a movie like Reservoir Dogs, it's time for him to move on and make a better one."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's in the action scenes that things fall apart. Consider the scene where Spider-Man is given a cruel choice between saving Mary Jane or a cable car full of school kids. He tries to save both, so that everyone dangles from webbing that seems about to pull loose. The visuals here could have given an impression of the enormous weights and tensions involved, but instead the scene seems more like a bloodless storyboard of the idea. In other CGI scenes, Spidey swoops from great heights to street level and soars back up among the skyscrapers again with such dizzying speed that it seems less like a stunt than like a fast-forward version of a stunt."

- Roger Ebert

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"I did not walk into the screening with a light step and a heart that sang. For that matter, I did not walk out afterward with my spirits renewed. But this movie is nowhere near as bad as it might have been, and probably is the best possible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie."

- Roger Ebert

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"To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve."

- Roger Ebert

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"This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think. Movies like Top Gun are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless. The dogfights are absolutely the best since Clint Eastwood's electrifying aerial scenes in Firefox. But look out for the scenes where the people talk to one another."

- Roger Ebert

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"You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it."

- Roger Ebert

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"I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from hell."

- Roger Ebert

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"We'll probably be debating A Clockwork Orange for a long time — a long, weary and pointless time. The New York critical establishment has guaranteed that for us. They missed the boat on 2001, so maybe they were trying to catch up with Kubrick on this one. Or maybe the news weeklies just needed a good movie cover story for Christmas."

- Roger Ebert

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"When the film premiered at Cannes 2003, Lars von Trier was accused of not portraying Americans accurately, but how many movies do? Anything by David Spade come to mind? Von Trier could justifiably make a fantasy about America, even an anti-American fantasy, and produce a good film, but here he approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner."

- Roger Ebert

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"The audience I joined was perhaps 80 percent female. I heard some sniffles and glimpsed some tears, and no wonder. Eat Pray Love is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat."

- Roger Ebert

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"I know that the real Brockovich liked to dress provocatively; that's her personal style and she's welcome to it. But the Hollywood version makes her look like a miniskirted hooker, with bras that peek cheerfully above her necklines."

- Roger Ebert

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"Why bother to remake Fame if you don't have clue about why the 1980 movie was special? Why take a touching experience and make it into a shallow exercise? Why begin with a R-rated look at plausible kids with real problems and tame it into a PG-rated after-school special? Why cast actors who are sometimes too old and experienced to play seniors, let alone freshmen?"

- Roger Ebert

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"OK. We're on the sofa. We look at the scene. We take a second look. We focus on Travolta. This is an athlete. His reflexes are on a hair trigger. He can deal with several enemies at a time. He can duck, jump, hurdle, spin and leap. One slight miscalculation, and he's dead. He doesn't miss a beat. He's in superb condition, especially for a guy whose favorite food is Cheese Royales. That's a little joke reminding us of "Pulp Fiction," and the last thing you should do is remind the audience of a movie they'd rather be home watching."

- Roger Ebert

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"By the end of this long film, I would have traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of blue skies... Gladiator lacks joy. It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are."

- Roger Ebert

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"Call me hardhearted, call me cynical, but please don't call me if they make Home Alone 3."

- Roger Ebert

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"It was W. C. Fields who hated to appear in the same scene with a child, a dog, or a plunging neckline - because nobody in the audience would be looking at him. Jennifer Aniston has the same problem in this movie even when she's in scenes all by herself."

- Roger Ebert

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"You used to be able to depend on a bad film being poorly made. No longer. The Punisher: War Zone [sic] is one of the best-made bad movies I've seen...Its only flaw is that it's disgusting."

- Roger Ebert

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"Consider an opening musical number set in a maternity ward, where Tommy Pickles and his friends Chuckie Finster and Phil and Lil DeVille are hoping for a look at Tommy's new kid brother, Dilbert. (Dil Pickles — get it? For Rugrats fans, this is humor of the highest order.) They wake up the babies, who do a number that seems inspired by Bubsy Berkeley, except that the Berkeley girls never had to supply their own dancing waters, if you get my drift."

- Roger Ebert

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"Showgirls is the first big-budget "adults only" movie in a few years and, to be sure, it contains so much nudity that the sexy parts are when the girls put on their clothes. It contains no true eroticism, however, and that's why I think it reflects a grounding in sexual fantasy: Eroticism requires a mental connection between two people, while masturbation requires only the other person's image."

- Roger Ebert

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"Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue."

- Roger Ebert

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"Philip Kaufman's Twisted walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey. But back to deus ex machina. This is a phrase you will want to study and master, not merely to amaze friends during long bus journeys but because it so perfectly describes what otherwise might take you thousands of words. Imagine a play on a stage. The hero is in a fix. The dragon is breathing fire, his sword is broken, his leg is broken, his spirit is broken, and the playwright's imagination is broken. Suddenly there is the offstage noise of the grinding of gears, and invisible machinery lowers a god onto the stage, who slays the dragon, heals the hero, and fires the playwright. He is the "god from the machine.""

- Roger Ebert

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"Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date."

- Roger Ebert

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"There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is."

- Roger Ebert

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"Basic Instinct 2 is not good in any rational or defensible way, but not bad in irrational and indefensible ways. I savored the icy abstraction of the modern architecture, which made the people look like they came with the building. I grinned at that absurd phallic skyscraper that really does exist in London. I liked the recklessness of the sex-and-speed sequence that opens the movie (and, curiously, looks to have been shot in Chicago). I could appreciate the plot once I accepted that it was simply jerking my chain. You can wallow in it … Footnote No. 2: My 1-1/2-star rating is like a cold shower, designed to take my mind away from giving it four stars."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as LouAnne Johnson... [h]er teaching methods are inventive. She bribes them with candy bars and free trips to amusement parks, and involves them in the words of that important poet, Bob Dylan (the Tambourine Man might have been a drug dealer!). Soon they're in the school library, finding connections between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas... [w]hat, exactly, will these disadvantaged inner-city kids accomplish by being bribed with candy bars and the "relevancy" of Bob Dylan? Can they read and write? Can they compete in the job market? An educational system that has brought them to the point we observe in the first classroom scene has already failed them so miserably that all of Miss Johnson's karate lessons are not going to be much help."

- Roger Ebert

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"In the upstairs bedroom, old Ann dies very slowly, remembering the events of the long-ago wedding night and the next morning...She is attended by a nurse with an Irish accent (Eileen Atkins), who sometimes prompts her: "Remember a happy time!" Dissolve to Ann's memory of a happy time. It is so mundane that if it qualifies as a high point in her life, it compares with Paris Hilton remembering a good stick of gum."

- Roger Ebert

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"There's one thing to be said for a remake of a 1984 movie that uses the original's screenplay. This 2011 version is so similar — sometimes song for song and line for line — that I was wickedly tempted to reprint my 1984 review, word for word. But That Would be Wrong."

- Roger Ebert

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"Here is a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy. Less enlightened than Gone with the Wind, obsessed with military strategy, impartial between South and North, religiously devout, it waits 70 minutes before introducing the first of its two speaking roles for African Americans; "Stonewall" Jackson assures his black cook that the South will free him, and the cook looks cautiously optimistic. If World War II were handled this way, there'd be hell to pay."

- Roger Ebert

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"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason."

- Roger Ebert

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"Immortals is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see. Eiko Ishioka's costume designs alone deserve an Oscar nomination. "They weren't at all historically accurate," grumbled a woman in the elevator after the sneak preview, as if lots of documentation exists about the wardrobes of the gods. She added: "I guess that's what we deserve for using free tickets we got at a Blackhawks game.""

- Roger Ebert

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"I saw The Lonely Guy all by myself. It was one of those Saturday afternoons where the snow is coming down gray and mean, and you can't even get a decent recorded message on the answering machines of strangers … "Good luck," an usher told me. "You're going to need it." He was right … The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that seems to have been made to play in empty theaters on overcast January afternoons … [It] is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie. I counted two Diet 7-Ups, two Tabs, and Steve Martin."

- Roger Ebert

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"I was noodling around Rotten Tomatoes, trying to determine who played the bank's security chief, and noticed the movie had not yet been reviewed by anybody. Hold on! In the "Forum" section for this movie, "islandhome" wrote at 7:58 a.m. Jan. 8: "review of this movie … tonight i'll post." At 11:19 a.m. Jan. 10, "islandhome" was finally back with the promised review. It is written without capital letters, flush left like a poem, and I quote it verbatim, spelling and all:"

- Roger Ebert

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"Clerks spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types. The year that Clerks played at the Cannes Film Festival, I was the chairman of a panel discussion of independent filmmakers. Most of them talked about their battles to stay free from Hollywood's playsafe strategies. But Kevin Smith cheerfully said he'd be happy to do whatever the studios wanted, if they'd pay for his films. At the time, I thought he was joking."

- Roger Ebert

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"We can laugh at comedies like this for two reasons: Because we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. I do not much like laughing down at people, which is why the comedies of Adam Sandler make me squirmy (most people, I know, laugh because they like him). In the case of Napoleon Dynamite, I certainly don't like him, but then the movie makes no attempt to make him likable. Truth is, it doesn't even try to be a comedy. It tells his story and we are supposed to laugh because we find humor the movie pretends it doesn't know about."

- Roger Ebert

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"They say baseball is popular because everyone thinks they can play it. Similar reasoning may explain the popularity of the Olsen twins: Teenage girls love them because they believe they could be them. What, after all, do Mary-Kate and Ashley do in New York Minute that could not be done by any reasonably presentable female adolescent? Their careers are founded not on what they do, but on the vicarious identification of their fans, who enjoy seeing two girls making millions for doing what just about anybody could do."

- Roger Ebert

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"Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles."

- Roger Ebert

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"Attending this new version, I felt oddly as if I were watching a provincial stock company doing the best it could without the Broadway cast. I was reminded of the child prodigy who was summoned to perform for a famous pianist. The child climbed onto the piano stool and played something by Chopin with great speed and accuracy. The great musician then patted the child on the head and said, 'You can play the notes. Someday, you may be able to play the music.'"

- Roger Ebert

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"Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie is a good one and there are talented people in the cast, what we have here is a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style."

- Roger Ebert

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"These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with Revenge of the Nerds II. The movie doesn't have the nerve to be about real nerds. It hedges its bets. A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand."

- Roger Ebert

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"I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there?"

- Roger Ebert

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"D. Kepesh of Chicago writes, "Do you ever find yourself distracted during a screening by thoughts of the review you will later write? Distracted to the point of missing part of the film?" Sometimes it gets much worse than that, D. Sometimes a movie is so witless that I abandon any attempt to think up clever lines for my review, and return in defeat to actually watching the film itself. I approach it as an opportunity for meditation. My mantra is "aargh ... aargh ... ""

- Roger Ebert

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"I remember when hard-core first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all."

- Roger Ebert

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"Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."

- Roger Ebert

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"So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. … What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?"

- Roger Ebert

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"The Bucket List is a movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible. I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens."

- Roger Ebert

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"The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project."

- Roger Ebert

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"I've been reviewing movies for a long time, and I can't think of one that more dramatically shoots itself in the foot."

- Roger Ebert

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"The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose — a one joke movie, if it had one joke. The two characters wander witlessly past the bizarre backdrops of Las Vegas (some real, some hallucinated, all interchangeable) while zonked out of their minds. Humor depends on attitude. Beyond a certain point, you don't have an attitude, you simply inhabit a state. I've heard a lot of funny jokes about drunks and druggies, but these guys are stoned beyond comprehension, to the point where most of their dialog could be paraphrased as "eh?"… As for Depp, what was he thinking he made this movie? He was once in trouble for trashing a New York hotel room, just like the heroes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What was that? Research? After River Phoenix died of an overdose outside Depp's club, you wouldn't think Depp would see much humor in this story — but then, of course, there *isn't* much humor in this story."

- Roger Ebert

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"Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners."

- Roger Ebert

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"There is a word for this movie, and that word is: Ick."

- Roger Ebert

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"I Am Curious (Yellow) is not merely not erotic. It is anti-erotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds... I think there actually is a director in Sweden who is dull and square enough to seriously consider this an art of moviemaking."

- Roger Ebert

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"The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign... After the screening was over and the lights went up, I observed a couple of my colleagues in deep and earnest conversation, trying to resolve twists in the plot. They were applying more thought to the movie than the makers did. A critic's mind is a terrible thing to waste."

- Roger Ebert

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"They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: It's possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects, and I am not forgetting the Chucky doll or the desert intestine from Star wars. To see the snowman is to dislike the snowman. It doesn't look like a snowman, anyway."

- Roger Ebert

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"In this business one becomes a connoisseur. I can now see that [[Jim Carrey|[Jim] Carrey]] is a virtuoso, [[w:Chris Farley|[Chris] Farley]] is at least hard-working, [[Adam Sandler|[Adam] Sandler]] is hopeless and Pauly Shore bypasses all categories to achieve a kind of transcendent fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect. His appeal must be limited to people whose self-esteem and social skills are so damaged that they find humor, or at least relief, in at last encountering a movie character less successful than themselves."

- Roger Ebert

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"...in New Year's Eve, we look out over the surging throng of ecstatic celebrants, and the sea of humanity is blue. They're all wearing freebie hats from Nivea skin creme. No hats for the Knicks, Budweiser or [[w:I Love New York|I Heart [sic] New York]]. All Nivea skin creme. Countless hats of Nivea blue. I've heard of product placement, but this is carpet bombing."

- Roger Ebert

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"Terri (Hilary Duff)'s new roommate is Denise (Dana Davis), who plans to work hard for a scholarship, and resents Terri as a distraction. Sizing up Terri's wardrobe and her smile, she tells her: "You're like some kind of retro Brady Buncher." I hate it when a movie contains its own review."

- Roger Ebert

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"I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again."

- Roger Ebert

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"Reader, I must confess that while attending the sneak preview with its overwhelmingly female audience, I was gob-smacked by the delightful cleavage on display. Do women wear their lowest-cut frocks for each other?"

- Roger Ebert

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"Remember the words George Carlin said could not be said on TV? There's now a kind of movie that cannot be made without using all of them except one. Even the online trailer may startle you. It's one of those adults-only Red Band Trailers which you have to give your age in order to view. I lied about my age. Nobody under 17 would ever do that."

- Roger Ebert

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"It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot."

- Roger Ebert

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"But now here is the director's cut, which is 20 minutes shorter, lops off a couple of characters and a few of the infinite subplots, and is even more of a mess. I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick."

- Roger Ebert

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"If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination... The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal."

- Roger Ebert

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"The characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start. Granted some of them are more than 100 years old, but still: their charisma is by Madame Tussaud. The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of Twilight (2008), guts it, and leaves it for undead. You know you're in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead. Obviously the characters all have. Long opening stretches of this film make utterly no sense unless you walk in knowing the first film, and hopefully both Stephanie Meyer novels, by heart. Edward and Bella spend murky moments glowering at each other and thinking, So, here we are again."

- Roger Ebert

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"Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone. You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen. You know something has gone wrong when a story is about two heroes in the Old West, and the last shot is of a mechanical spider riding off into the sunset."

- Roger Ebert

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"Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words. One of the heroes even wears the penis of a minotaur on a string around his neck. I hate it when that happens."

- Roger Ebert

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"There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander, a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor. You might want to read that sentence twice. The logic: Child labor is necessary to the economic health of the fashion industry, and so its opponents must be eliminated...if the Malaysians made a comedy about the assassination of the president of the United States because of his opposition to slavery, it would seem approximately as funny to us as Zoolander would seem to them."

- Roger Ebert

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"If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly; I doubt if it'll be around to miss for long."

- Roger Ebert

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"The dialogue consists almost entirely of terse screams: Watch it! Incoming! Move! Look out! Fire! Move! The only characters I re­member having four sentences in a row are the anchors on cable news. … Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart."

- Roger Ebert

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"Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. The visuals are grubby and drab. The characters are unkempt and have rotten teeth. Breathing tubes hang from their noses like ropes of snot. The soundtrack sounds like the boom mike is being slammed against the inside of a 55-gallon drum. The plot. … The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why. … Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough."

- Roger Ebert

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"Boat Trip arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing."

- Roger Ebert

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"Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They're going for the Good Parts. There are two Good Parts, not counting her naked ride on horseback, which was the only scene in the movie that had me wondering how she did it. The real future of Bolero is in home cassette rentals, where your fast forward and instant replay controls will supply the editing job the movie so desperately needs."

- Roger Ebert

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"Hitchcock said a movie should play the audience like a piano. Death Race played me like a drum. It is an assault on all senses, including common. Walking out, I had the impression I had just seen the video game and was still waiting for the movie."

- Roger Ebert

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"Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience."

- Roger Ebert

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"This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from 10th graders that are better made than this... I have often asked myself, "What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?" Now I know."

- Roger Ebert

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""This sucks on so many levels." — Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie stars six teenage characters who have been marketed on TV and in toy stores. They have names, but no discernible personalities. None of them ever says anything more interesting than "You guys!" As teenagers, they are skilled in-line skaters and karate fighters, but they don't get their real powers until they turn into faceless clones in Power Rangers uniforms with plastic masks and helmets. Is that the message? Faceless conformity is the way to success? Certainly the Rangers are not individuals in or out of uniform, but I wonder if they don't represent a triumph of merchandising over creativity. Children's heroes have traditionally been individualistic and eccentric. The Rangers are not, properly speaking, even characters. They are color-coded products...Paging through the movie's press kit, I came across this quote attributed to Amy Jo Johnson, who plays Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger: " `Mighty Morphin Power Rangers™: The Movie' is a mix between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. " I wonder if Amy Jo actually said "TM" when she was delivering that wonderfully fresh and spontaneous quote, which is so much more involved than anything she says in the movie. More to the point, I wonder if she has ever seen "Star Wars" or "The Wizard of Oz.""

- Roger Ebert

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"Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children."

- Roger Ebert

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"Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer."

- Roger Ebert

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"Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp."

- Roger Ebert

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"Saving Silverman is so bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve. This is the kind of movie that gives even its defenders fits of desperation. Consider my friend James Berardinelli, the best of the Web-based critics. No doubt 10 days of oxygen deprivation at the Sundance Film Festival helped inspire his three-star review, in which he reports optimistically, "Saving Silverman" has its share of pratfalls and slapstick moments, but there's almost no flatulence." Here's a critical rule of thumb: You know you're in trouble when you're reduced to praising a movie for its absence of fart jokes, and have to add "almost"… as for Neil Diamond, Saving Silverman is his first appearance in a fiction film since The Jazz Singer, and one can only marvel that he waited 20 years to appear in a second film, and found one even worse than his first one."

- Roger Ebert

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"The Spice Girls are easier to tell apart than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that is small consolation: What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names? They occupy Spice World as if they were watching it: They're so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs. During a rehearsal scene, their director tells them, with such truth that we may be hearing a secret message from the screenwriter, "That was absolutely perfect — without being actually any good." Spice World is obviously intended as a ripoff of A Hard Day's Night which gave The Beatles to the movies...the huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented — while, let's face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts."

- Roger Ebert

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"It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer."

- Roger Ebert

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"There is a scene in this film where a character is defecated on by several people at the same time, and I dunno … I didn't enjoy it."

- Roger Ebert

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"Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame..."This movie," said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, "is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.""

- Roger Ebert

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"Chaos is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel -- a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's 'only' a horror film, or a slasher film. It is an exercise in heartless cruelty and it ends with careless brutality. The movie denies not only the value of life, but the possibility of hope."

- Roger Ebert

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"Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes. … Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers … should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child. The movie created a spot of controversy... Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed [2004's] Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that … bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic." Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. … Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers..." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.""

- Roger Ebert

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"A burning at the stake, an afternoon in the rack, headscrews, a douche with boiling water, nails into hands, induced vomiting, ripped tongues, dead babes, human target practice, possession by devils, rape, transvestism, nude orgies in the nunnery. Put them all together and they spell Committed Art, because these are modern times and I certainly hope none of us is opposed to truth."

- Roger Ebert

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"Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible."

- Roger Ebert

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"Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie opens as the drifter "inadvertently" (Araki's word, in the press kit) blows off the head of a Korean convenience store owner... It continues as the "enigmatic Xavier" (I am again quoting from the wonderfully revealing press kit) "has such rotten karma that every time they stop the car for fries and Diet Cokes, someone ends up dying in one gruesome way or another." Wait, there's more: "As the youthful band of outsiders continues their travels through the wasteland of America, Amy finds herself (having sex with) both Jordan and Xavier, forging a triangle of love, sex and desperation too pure for this world." Now let's deconstruct that. (1) The correct word is "its," not "their." (2) "Band of outsiders" is an insider reference to A Band Apart," the name of Quentin Tarantino's production company, which itself is a pun on the title of a film by Godard. (3) Is it remotely possible that America is a "wasteland" because Amy, Jordan and Xavier kill someone every time they stop for fries and a soda? That wouldn't have occurred to this movie. (4) The clause "someone ends up dying" is a passive way to avoid saying that the three characters kill them. This is precisely the same construction used by many serial killers and heads of state, who use language to separate themselves from the consequences of their actions."

- Roger Ebert

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"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels... The day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny."

- Roger Ebert

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"Guyana-Cult of the Damned has crawled out from under a rock and into local theaters, and will do nicely as this week's example of the depths to which people will plunge in search of a dollar. The movie is a gruesome version of the Jonestown massacre of 1978, so badly written and directed it illustrates a simple rule of movie exhibition: If a film is nauseating and reprehensible enough in the first place, it doesn't matter how badly it's made - people will go anyway."

- Roger Ebert

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"I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals."

- Roger Ebert

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"This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency. In the original, a woman foolishly thought to go on holiday by herself at a secluded cabin. She attracted the attention of depraved local men, who raped her, one after the other. Then the film ended with her fatal revenge. In this film, less time is devoted to the revenge, and more time to verbal, psychological and physical violence against her. Thus it works even better as vicarious cruelty against women."

- Roger Ebert

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"This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do."

- Roger Ebert

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"Little Indian, Big City is one of the worst movies ever made. I detested every moronic minute of it...if you, under any circumstances, see Little Indian, Big City, I will never let you read one of my reviews again."

- Roger Ebert

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"Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line...Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor."

- Roger Ebert

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"Mandingo is racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through in an audience made up largely of children, as I did last Saturday afternoon. The film has an "R" rating, which didn't keep many kids out, since most came with their parents... if [Chicago] believes Mandingo should be shown to children, then there are no possible standards left and the only thing to do is transfer the censors to the parks department, where they can supervise paper‑plate‑ throwing contests."

- Roger Ebert

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"I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

- Roger Ebert

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"The vast majority of the members of all religions, I believe and would argue, don't want to kill anybody. They want to love and care for their families, find decent work that sustains life and comfort, live in peace and get along with their neighbors. It is a deviant streak in some humans, I suspect, that drives them toward self-righteous violence, and uses religion as a convenient alibi... I am trying as hard as I can to imagine the audience for this movie. Every time I make any progress, it scares me."

- Roger Ebert

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"What planet did the makers of this film come from? What assumptions do they have about the purpose and quality of life? I ask because She's Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it's a first: the first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality."

- Roger Ebert

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"The movie is an exhausted retread of the old campus romance gag where the pretty girl almost believes the lies of the reprehensible schemer, instead of trusting the nice guy who loves her. The only originality the movie brings to this formula is to make it incomprehensible, through the lurching incompetence of its story structure. Details are labored while the big picture remains unpainted... I was appalled by the poverty of its imagination."

- Roger Ebert

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"Sour Grapes is a comedy about things that aren't funny. It reminded me of Crash, an erotic thriller about things no one finds erotic. The big difference is that David Cronenberg, who made Crash, knew that people were not turned on by auto accidents. Larry David, who wrote and directed Sour Grapes, apparently thinks people are amused by cancer, accidental castration, racial stereotypes and bitter family feuds... The more I think of it, the more Sour Grapes really does resemble Crash (except that Crash was not a bad film). Both movies are like watching automobile accidents. Only one was intended to be."

- Roger Ebert

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"I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams. I think of filmgoers on a date, seeing this movie and then — what? I guess they'll have to laugh at it, irony being a fashionable response to the experience of being had. … Do yourself a favor. There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited — or more scared, if that's what you want. This is not one of them. Don't let it kill 98 minutes of your life."

- Roger Ebert

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"I had a hard time watching Wolf Creek. It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking."

- Roger Ebert

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"It is all very well and good for Linda Lovelace, the star of the movie, to advocate sexual freedom; but the energy she brings to her role is less awesome than discouraging. If you have to work this hard at sexual freedom, maybe it isn't worth the effort."

- Roger Ebert

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"I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine."

- Roger Ebert

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"Roger Ebert is a national treasure. He is the most recognizable and well known movie critic. He has been my favorite writer for some time now. I do not always agree with his opinions, which is my right, but he always backs them up. He is not someone who will say that such and such about movie X is bad and leave it at that — he will give the reasons for his thought process."

- Roger Ebert

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"Through his boorish, knee-jerk leftism, Ebert has become merely another Hollywood elitist thumbing his nose at America. Two thumbs down."

- Roger Ebert

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"It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw."

- Roger Ebert

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"I was very saddened today to hear of the death of Roger Ebert. Roger... has been my favorite film critic since forever. I did not always agree with him, but I always found him insightful and fun to read. He was not just a terrific critic, he was a terrific WRITER. .. A brilliant man, a good life. I give him two thumbs up."

- Roger Ebert

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"For a generation of Americans — and especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn't like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical."

- Roger Ebert

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"Nobody has been more important in telling Americans why we should love film than Roger Ebert."

- Roger Ebert

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""The movies won’t be the same without Roger," the President of the United States said today in a statement upon the death of Roger Ebert, one of the most influential American writers and critics of the last quarter century. He was, to begin, a great film critic, a joyful viewer who always preached that great art and popular entertainment were not exclusive. … He was also a great essayist, and the world now begs some book publisher to come along to bind his best blog posts, if only so they can be preserved by others who loved the printed word as much as he did. But most importantly, he celebrated humanity, and the things it creates."

- Roger Ebert

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"Here’s something you don’t hear said about many movie critics: people love Roger Ebert. … There’s a good reason for this: Ebert doesn’t stand between moviegoers and the audience. Rather, his regular readers are serious movie-lovers who see him as their rep, the guy out there fighting to make movies less stupid, more entertaining, more intelligent, more everything. You don’t have to agree with him — and I certainly didn’t in this book, when he ragged on Team America and Jesus is Magic, two movies where I laughed myself sick — to know that he’s on your side. He sees the bad movies so you don’t have to, and he’s seen the same ones over and over. … Mere bile, though, isn’t his game; he’s as interested in why movies fail as why they work. A lot of the time, it’s obvious: because it’s made by morons for morons. In these cases, Ebert drags us through the plot in as entertaining a fashion as possible. … Forty years on, he’s still a moviegoer’s best friend."

- Roger Ebert

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"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."

- Jane Wagner

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"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it...."

- Jane Wagner

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"Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs."

- Jane Wagner

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"When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading."

- Jane Wagner

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"It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."

- Jane Wagner

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"All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific."

- Jane Wagner

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"If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less."

- Jane Wagner

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"Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination."

- Jane Wagner

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"No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

- Jane Wagner

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"I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you."

- Jane Wagner

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"Your problem is your role models were models."

- Jane Wagner

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"I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em … the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen."

- Jane Wagner

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"Remember we're all in this alone."

- Jane Wagner

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"Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed."

- Jane Wagner

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"For fast acting relief, try slowing down."

- Jane Wagner

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"If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?"

- Jane Wagner

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"If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?"

- Jane Wagner

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"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?"

- Jane Wagner

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"If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed."

- Jane Wagner

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"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world."

- Jane Wagner

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"The best mind-altering drug is truth."

- Jane Wagner

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"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

- Jane Wagner

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"Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?"

- Jane Wagner

• 0 likes• Actresses from Tennessee• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States•
"Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem... Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days."

- Jane Wagner

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"I don't think you could say now that ABC is crasser than the other two networks. But as long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. It becomes an ever-descending spiral."

- Dick Cavett

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"It's a wonderful job for people who have never had a nervous breakdown but always wanted one."

- Dick Cavett

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"Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine."

- Dick Cavett

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"It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear."

- Dick Cavett

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"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"

- Dick Cavett

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"You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other."

- Dick Cavett

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"You can piss away valuable hours of your life reading Ayn Rand—her wretched appeal to the young, her wretched writing, her wretched person. She was supposed to be on my show; I was kind of sorry she wasn’t, because I was kind of laying for her. I did not succumb, as a kid, to being enthused by Ayn Rand, and that sense of power, as every kid was at one time until they outgrew it. The old bag sent over a list of fifteen conditions for appearing with me, or for appearing with anyone, I guess. One of them was, “There will be no disagreeing with Ms. Rand’s philosophy.” […] I wrote at the bottom of the list, to be sent back to her, “There will be no Ms. Rand, either.”"

- Dick Cavett

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"The playwright George S. Kaufman remembered what he called the “greatest ‘line reversal’ of my lifetime.” He liked to drop in on Broadway shows he had directed to, as he put it, “just check on them and take out the ‘improvements.’ ” He was eternally grateful to have caught one performance when he heard an actor commit the gem. It ran: “Her breath would take your beauty away.” He kept the line framed on his desk ever afterward."

- Dick Cavett

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"(Q: Is conversation an art form?) Oh yes. Certainly. And I have delighted in overhearing conversations that were artistic. I like to listen to people talk. I enjoyed the Dick Cavett show, because Cavett is so articulate and apparently at ease, and his guests on that show were by and large people who were very interesting to listen to, and Cavett had the knack of bringing them out. So when I watched that show, I had the sense that it was an art form. Cavett was making it artistic. (Was he creating himself as well as creating language?) Absolutely. (And there were different Cavetts? There were different selves in different circumstances?) I think he was a different man depending upon who he talked to. He was a different man every time."

- Dick Cavett

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"Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

- Mae West

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"Why don't you come up sometime and see me? … Come on up, I'll tell your fortune."

- Mae West

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"Oh, Beulah, Peel me a grape."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I only like two kinds of men, domestic and foreign."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"It's not the men in your life that count, it's the life in your men."

- Mae West

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"When women go wrong, men go right after them."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"A man in the house is worth two in the street."

- Mae West

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"When I'm caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I never tried."

- Mae West

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"You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"You take one thing and add it to another and you get two. Two and two is four; and five'll get you ten if you know how to work it!"

- Mae West

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"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."

- Mae West

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"I'm the kinda girl who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night"

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"To her British lover about to climb in bed with 80-something Mae: She said that she hoped soon to be able to say what Paul Revere said — 'The British are coming'. This was the last one-liner Mae ever uttered on film."

- Mae West

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"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"When you got the personality, you don't need the nudity."

- Mae West

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"Marriage is a fine institution, but I'm not ready for an institution."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I've been in more laps than a napkin."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong."

- Mae West

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"I've always had a weakness for foreign affairs."

- Mae West

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Comedians from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

- Mae West

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"That man was so much larger than life that there's no scale by which to measure him. Most of Wilson's dialogue, if put down on paper, seems either vulgar or obscene."

- Gene Fowler

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"Sometimes I think it sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running."

- Gene Fowler

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"What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins."

- Gene Fowler

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"A book is never finished; it's abandoned."

- Gene Fowler

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"Men are not against you, they are merely for themselves."

- Gene Fowler

• 0 likes• Journalists from Denver• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Everyone needs a warm personal enemy or two to keep him free of rust in the movable parts of the mind."

- Gene Fowler

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"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

- Gene Fowler

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"The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from."

- Gene Fowler

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"He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled."

- Gene Fowler

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"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?""

- Joseph Heller

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"The only wisdom I think I've attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people's ideology and other people's arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don't like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don't like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people. It's one of the reasons I keep a distance from all religious beliefs. I think in this country and in Australia too there's a late intolerance in most religions, an intolerance, a part that could easily become persecutions. We have some ultra-orthodox Jewish sects here in New York and I fear them as much as I would fear a Nazi organisation."

- Joseph Heller

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"Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?"

- Joseph Heller

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"It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him."

- Joseph Heller

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"The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him."

- Joseph Heller

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"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed."

- Joseph Heller

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"Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

- Joseph Heller

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"Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy."

- Joseph Heller

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"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

- Joseph Heller

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"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive."

- Joseph Heller

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"“From now on I'm thinking only of me.” Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?” “Then,” said Yossarian, “I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”"

- Joseph Heller

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"Let someone else get killed!" "Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?" "Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"

- Joseph Heller

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"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three."

- Joseph Heller

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":Based on quote from Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Act II, scene v: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”"

- Joseph Heller

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"The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with."

- Joseph Heller

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"Outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals."

- Joseph Heller

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"Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!"

- Joseph Heller

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"Yossarian — the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist."

- Joseph Heller

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"They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

- Joseph Heller

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"You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."

- Joseph Heller

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"But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share."

- Joseph Heller

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"This time Milo had gone too far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him...Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made."

- Joseph Heller

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"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action."

- Joseph Heller

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"Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?" Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. "This long." He snapped his fingers. "A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man." "Old?" asked Clevinger with surprise. "What are you talking about?" "Old." "I'm not old." "You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. "Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?"

- Joseph Heller

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"How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?"

- Joseph Heller

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"The God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be."

- Joseph Heller

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"Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all."

- Joseph Heller

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"Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."

- Joseph Heller

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"Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."

- Joseph Heller

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"He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously."

- Joseph Heller

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"The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

- Joseph Heller

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"The yellow moon turned orange and was soon red as the setting sun."

- Joseph Heller

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"I said it again as a German might. "Rabinovitz. Ich bin Lew Rabinowitz, LR, von Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Du Kennst?" And then I spoke Yiddish. "Und ich bin ein Yid. Farshtest?" And then in English. "I am a Jew. Understand?" And then in my fractured German. "Ich bin Jude. Verstehst?" Now they didn't know where to look, but they did not want to look at me. I've got blue eyes that can turn into slits of ice, Claire still tells me, and a pale, European skin that can turn red fast when I laugh hard or get mad, and I wasn't sure they believed me."

- Joseph Heller

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"There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything."

- Joseph Heller

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"I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime."

- Joseph Heller

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"I do know that girls in their early twenties are easy and sweet. (Girls in their late twenties are easier but sad, and that isn't so sweet.) They are easy, I think, because they are sweet, and they are sweet, I think, because they are dumb."

- Joseph Heller

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"The years are too short, the days are too long."

- Joseph Heller

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"When I grow up I want to be a little boy."

- Joseph Heller

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"In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse."

- Joseph Heller

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"Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.)"

- Joseph Heller

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"Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do."

- Joseph Heller

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"Forever goes quick."

- Joseph Heller

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"Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women or homosexuals should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity."

- Joseph Heller

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"Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway."

- Joseph Heller

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"The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon."

- Joseph Heller

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"I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life."

- Joseph Heller

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"I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it."

- Joseph Heller

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"Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?"

- Joseph Heller

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"Love is potent stuff, isn't it?"

- Joseph Heller

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"Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck."

- Joseph Heller

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"The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?"

- Joseph Heller

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"He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?"

- Joseph Heller

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"God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is."

- Joseph Heller

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"When one is infatuated, faults are endearing that in others would be heinous."

- Joseph Heller

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"I am arrogant enough to wish I were modest as he and modest enough to know that this is arrogance."

- Joseph Heller

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"Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?" "There is no heaven. There is no hell." "There is no heaven? There is no hell?" "That's all in your mind."

- Joseph Heller

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"If character is destiny, the good are damned."

- Joseph Heller

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"The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it."

- Joseph Heller

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"Nothing fails like success."

- Joseph Heller

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"How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust."

- Joseph Heller

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"No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die."

- Joseph Heller

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"He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. (Shakespeare's Othello said it first.)"

- Joseph Heller

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"Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there."

- Joseph Heller

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"How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me."

- Joseph Heller

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"Everybody is as unstable as water."

- Joseph Heller

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"The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us."

- Joseph Heller

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"I'm not even sure we really had that much need for God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him."

- Joseph Heller

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"All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit."

- Joseph Heller

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"If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?"

- Joseph Heller

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"No one lusting for blood is ever innocent. Or satisfied. I have not been innocent. Or satisfied. Just as the man who wants silver will not be satisfied with silver, a man who wants the blood of another will not be satisfied with having that blood, nor the woman with jewels be satisfied with jewels, and the man who wants women will not be satisfied with women. Don't try telling me different. Haven't I looked about me in the city and seen how all labor is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not filled? Don't I know myself that no want is ever satisfied? Wishes are granted, goals attained. But wants? Forget them. They live as long as the person they inhabit."

- Joseph Heller

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"Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy."

- Joseph Heller

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"The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?"

- Joseph Heller

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"I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?"

- Joseph Heller

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"God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me."

- Joseph Heller

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"If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more."

- Joseph Heller

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"Fools hate knowledge"

- Joseph Heller

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"There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of everything"

- Joseph Heller

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"God had no need for Ecclesiastes to acquaint Him with vanity."

- Joseph Heller

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"Anyone seeking public office was not worthy to hold it."

- Joseph Heller

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"She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U.S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set."

- Joseph Heller

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"There’s a big cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. Someone comes up to this writer, I think it’s Joseph Heller, and says, “Joe, see that guy over there? He’s a hedge fund manager, and he made more money yesterday than you made on all the books you have ever published.” Heller looks over, pauses, and says, “Yeah, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”"

- Joseph Heller

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"The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness."

- Joseph Heller

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"Bellow (what a wonderful novel Humboldt's Gift is), Updike and Heller started very differently, but their own lives are octopuses taking up more and more space in their books: their divorces etc."

- Joseph Heller

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"My house got robbed in New York. I didn't even call the police. I wanted to, but I couldn't. My crib is too nice. It's not that it's too nice, but it's too nice for me. You know how the police are in New York. Soon as I open the door, they'll be like, "He's still here! Open and shut case, Johnson. Apparently this black guy broke in and hung up pictures of his family everywhere. Never seen anything like it.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"I don't even know why people do crime. They want to catch you, they're gonna catch you. They can. They got forensics. You ever seen forensics? Those guys find clues nobody else thinks about looking for. I mean it. You leave a pubic hair anywhere near a crime scene, they're gonna find that shit."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Is it me, or do commercials have nothing to do with the products anymore? You dig? I don't even know what a fucking commercial is about until the end. Every one is a surprise nowadays. You seen that commercial where the lady got the black eye? This lady comes on TV with a black eye, she's crying, she's like, "I smoke crack. And my husband beats me." And then a voice came on and said, "Got milk?""

- Dave Chappelle

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"I was at a party. Some guy gave me some shit. He's like, "Here, man. Take this. It's fucking mushrooms." I took it, I forgot all about it, you know. Then a couple days later I found that shit in my pocket. I'm thinking, "why not?" 'Cuz I'm thinking it's like weed. Some background shit. I planned my whole day out like it was weed. "I'll chew this shit up, then I'll go to the barbershop, get my hair cut and then I'll see a movie." I chewed it up. So far, so good. Then I was in the barbershop, like an hour later. And it's funny, 'cuz I was just thinking to myself, like, "Ooh, this stuff sucks. Tastes like athlete's foot. I feel sick, but I'm not really high." Then I looked in the mirror. I saw the barber's reflection. Man, it looked like a big penis was cutting my hair."

- Dave Chappelle

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"If you're an American, you're a racist. We're brought up from the beginning to think in generalizations. We never look at the individual. We rarely look at the individual. I'm a racist. I know I'm a racist. You know how I know? 'Cuz the other day I caught myself being racist against myself. There's so much shit going on, I got mixed up. Forgot whose team I was on and shit."

- Dave Chappelle

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"A black man would never dream of talking to the police high. That's a waste of weed. I'm serious. I mean, I'd be scared to talk to the police when I'm sleepy."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Have you ever watched, like, a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? That shit is wild shit. It's some wild shit. I mean, like, I was with my nephew. We sittin' there, we watchin' Pepé Le Pew. And I say to my nephew, I say, "Now pay attention to this guy, 'cuz he's funny. I used to watch him when I was little." And we watchin' Pepé Le Pew and I'm like, "Oh, man, what kind of fucking rapist is this guy? Like, take it easy, Pepé." My nephew was sittin' there crackin' up. "Heh, see, sometimes you gotta take the pussy like Pepé!" I was like, "No!" I had to turn the channel real quick. I turned it on Sesame Street. I said, "Oh, phew. Sesame Street. This is much better 'cuz now he'll learn how to count and spell." But now I'm watching it as an adult and I realize Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people. That's right. They got a character on there named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right in his face. "Oscar, you are so mean. Isn't he, kids?" "Yeah Oscar, you're a grouch!" He's like, "Bitch, I live in a fucking trash can! I'm the poorest motherfucker on Sesame Street. Nobody's helping me." Then you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people. "Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"White people do not like to talk about their political affiliations. It's a secret. You ever ask a white guy who's he voting for, like, "Hey, Bob, uh, Bob, who you gonna vote for?" "Dave! Dave! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy now. Take it easy. So anyway, um, I was fucking my wife in her ass, right? And I mean, it was something else." "Yeah, yeah, but who are you voting for?" "Dave! Dave, come on with the voting! I'm trying to tell you about fucking my wife, and you're asking me all these personal questions.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Like, see, I'd never vote for George Bush Jr., but I don't know George Bush Jr.'s politics. Only thing I know about George Bush Jr. is that that guy sniffed cocaine. That's right. Now, listen, we cannot have that shit in the White House. That might be fine for a mayor, but goddammit, not in the White House! Not in the White House. Mmm-mm. Know what I'm saying? The stakes are too high in the white house. Can't have no cokehead president, mmm-mm. He'd be selling nuclear secrets for twenty, thirty dollars and shit."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Chivalry is dead, and women killed it. ... Chivalry got killed by the feminist movement on them magazines that got women going crazy, because women got too much advice about men from other women. And they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. It's true. I see this shit in the magazines, I don't read them but I be seeing the cover, I'll be in the grocery store, fellas look at one of them magazines like, "What is this?" And it says on the cover: "100 Ways to Please Your Man" by some lady. Get out of here, man, come on. Ain't no 100 ways. That list is four things long. Just suck his dick, play with his balls, and then fix him a sandwich, and don't talk so much and that nigga gonna be happy!"

- Dave Chappelle

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"I had a crackhead break my car window one time, broke it. You know what he stole? A fucking candy bar I had lying on the seat. That's all he took. A goddamn candy bar. I was so mad, I drove around the neighborhood for five hours, looking for a crackhead with chocolate on his face. I did that. I finally found him, I grabbed that motherfucker and said, "Hey man! What's all this chocolate on your face, motherfucker?" He looked confused. "Chocolate? This is doo-doo, baby!""

- Dave Chappelle

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""Excuse me, I don't mean to be rude, are you an Indian?" And he was cool. "Yes. Yes, I'm an Indian." Still didn't believe him. I had to test him to be sure. This is fucked up, but I had a gum wrapper in my pocket, so I balled that shit up and I threw it on the floor. And a single tear came out of his eye. I said "oh, shit!" I had so many questions."

- Dave Chappelle

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"I know what you drink. See how quiet it got? Grape juice. Surprise, motherfuckers! You didn’t know I knew about grape juice, did you? Oh, don't play dumb with me. Like, "ah, what is it?" A lot of black people don’t have the privilege of knowing about grape juice, because they have grape drink. It's not the same formula that you get. Ain't no vitamins in that shit. You might have one of your black friends over: "Todd, Todd, would you care for a glass of grape juice?" "What? Nigga, what the fuck is juice? I want some grape drink, baby. Mmm. It’s purple." "I don't think I know what 'grape drink' is." "What?" "I have some apple juice, if you want." "What the fuck is juice? I want some apple drink. It's green." Remember that commercial for Sunny Delight when all the kids run in from outside playing and they all run to the fridge? "All right, I got some purple stuff, some Sunny D..." As soon as they say "Sunny D," all the kids go, "Yeah!" Watch the black kid in the back. If you ever see that commercial again, look at that black kid. He be like, "I want that purple stuff." That's drink, nigga, that is drink. They want drink. They don't want all them vitamins, man. They want drink. Sugar, water, purple. That's the ingredients: sugar, water and of course, purple."

- Dave Chappelle

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"I went to Disney World with my kids, which is a big deal for me. I don't get to see my kids so much. I do Chappelle's Show twenty hours a day, sleep for like, half an hour, raise my kids for ten, twenty minutes, and then I go back to work. Now, this particular day, I got to hook up the kids, we went to Disney World. Everybody at the park, fucking everybody, was like "Hey! Hey! I'm Rick James, bitch! Hey, I'm Rick James, bitch." It's like, "Hey man, hey, you mind not calling me a bitch in front of my kids? Time out, motherfucker. Can we take a day off?" Even Mickey Mouse did it. I said, "this is the most unprofessional shit I have ever seen in my life." I was fed up. I caught that motherfucker with an uppercut. Bop! Knocked his head clean off. Everybody was screaming. "Oh my god, oh my god! Mickey Mouse is Mexican!""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Stop worshipping celebrities so much. Just don't listen, don't pay attention. I remember, right around September 11th, Ja Rule was on MTV. That's what they said, they said "We got Ja Rule on the phone. Let's see what Ja's thoughts are on this tragedy." Who gives a fuck what Ja Rule thinks at a time like this, nigga, this is ridiculous. I don't want to dance, I'm scared to death. I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now. You think when bad shit happens to me, I'll be in the crib like, "Oh my god, this is terrible. Could somebody please find Ja Rule, get ahold of this motherfucker, so I can make sense of all this? Where is Ja?""

- Dave Chappelle

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"You know, I was in Santa Fe the other night, and a motherfucker threw a banana peel at me. Yeah, that didn't feel so good. Of course, it was a white person. Not to indict the whites, I'm just saying. Not to profile. And then, not only did he throw a banana peel at me, but, uh, it was premeditated. You could tell. You could tell, the peel was too brown. You know what I mean? You didn't eat that banana recently, motherfucker. You had that shit waiting on me."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Ebola was in Texas. Ebola made a visit. Killed that man in Dallas. Five days, that man melted to death. What happened to the brother in Dallas? "Where was the secret serum?" is what we all said. I remember in the beginning of Ebola, there were two American doctors that got sick in Africa. They flew them in a private jet straight to Atlanta, to the CDC. I didn't even know CDC saw patients. There, it was said, they administered what The New York Times called "a secret serum." I don't know what's in it. It's just like Colonel Sanders' recipe. But both of these motherfuckers survived. These doctors, thank god, are healthy. They are out there somewhere tonight, at Whole Foods, touching vegetables, walking around. Everything's okay. "Hey, Frank. How are you?" "Oh you didn't hear? I had Ebola last week. But uh, I'm doing alright now. I was bleeding out of my eyes and anus, so I got concerned, but I'm okay." What happened to the brother in Dallas? They just rubbed some vicks on that nigga's chest. "Good luck, little buddy.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Remember Paula Deen got fired from the Food Network? If you know anything about show business, it is really hard to get fired from the fucking Food Network. And they dropped that bitch like a hot potato. All because she called somebody an N-word thirty years before she had a show. I don't know who she said it to, but whoever it was was just looking at her like, "I'm gonna get you for this, bitch." That shit came back thirty years later like a Bill Cosby rape and sunk her battleship. And every black person was mad, but we weren't, like, that mad. It was more confusing than it was infuriating. I was just like, "well, how is this bitch gonna call me a nigger when she taught me how to fry chicken? That's not fair.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Name-calling does not break the modern black man. That's not gonna do the trick. I don't give a fuck about that. Like, if I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and for some reason, everyone behind the counter had a Ku Klux Klan hood on top of their head, what do you think I'm gonna do in this day and age? Run out of Kentucky Fried Chicken? Not if I'm hungry. I'll go straight to the front. "Hey, man. Let me get a two-piece." I don't give a fuck what he says. "You want a biscuit with that, nigger?" "I thought it came with a biscuit. What's all this attitude? I want a two-piece. Chop, chop. You know what it is." But I'm not gonna be mad. Why would I be mad? He's the one that's gotta work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, not me."

- Dave Chappelle

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"I got myself extorted, which happens in this business. I come home from the road. There was a FedEx sitting on the kitchen table, and it was addressed to me, so I opened it. I don't know who delivered it. And there was a videocassette inside, with a note written on it that said "Gotcha." Oh, my god. Can you imagine? I freaked out. I tore the whole house apart, trying to find a VCR. I hadn't seen a tape in, like, over a decade."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Everybody's mad at police now. I watched that - you see that shit on Netflix, Making a Murderer? The Steven Avery story? Yeah well if you haven't seen it, check it out. Steven Avery is in more trouble than any white person in the history of the United States has ever been in. In a justice system designed for him to thrive, he's failed miserably twice. I can't even wrap my mind about it. If Making a Murderer was about a black dude, that shit would be called "Duh!" Of course everything would go wrong."

- Dave Chappelle

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"There's a few reasons you don't see black people at my shows. One is because, obviously, black people have slower internet connections. I mean, that would be my guess. I don't know."

- Dave Chappelle

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"When you hear somebody call you "brother" too much, something terrible is about to happen. "Excuse me, brother. Brother?" And then I looked back, and the motherfucker had a tuxedo with the kente cloth tie. I said, "uh oh." He said, "I just want to ask you a couple questions." I said, "What publication are you with?" He said, "Me? I'm with The Daily Bongo." I said, "Daily Bongo? What the fuck? Who the fuck reads this?" He said, "Listen, brother, I just want to ask you a quick question. You understand that this year, this is a boycott for the Oscars. So I'm just wondering what made you, of all people, cross the motherfucking picket line and be here tonight?" I said, "Boycott? Nigga I haven't been working in ten years. What do you mean, boycott? I've been on strike, y'all niggas didn't stop working. I had to watch fucking Key and Peele do my show every night!""

- Dave Chappelle

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"My wife is Asian. She's Filipino. Alright, well, okay, so that explains it. Now you know why you see me at all those Filipino events. I'm not there picking up pussy, I'm dropping some off."

- Dave Chappelle

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"The fourth time I met OJ Simpson. The fourth time is not the funniest time, but it was the last time I'd see The Juice. For some reason, I was at the Kentucky Derby. It's a very long story. This is right after I quit Chappelle's Show in spectacular fashion. There was a party hosted by Michael Jordan, and every athlete I'd ever admired was in that room. Yes. And then I saw a familiar face by the bar, standing there, drinking alone. It was Chris Tucker. Now, you have to remember, at this time, we were both technically missing. And we went over and we're talking with one another, and motherfuckers were amazed to see us together. Seeing me and Chris Tucker at that point would be like seeing Bigfoot riding a unicorn. You wouldn't believe that's what you were seeing. And then, through all the gawkers, a familiar face pushed through the crowd. Here he was again. The Juice. He had his camera ready, he was like, "Dave, Chris. Good to see you guys. Hey, come on guys, let's all get together for a picture." And at the same time, me and Chris were like, "No. I can't do that. Sorry, Juice, my career is too flimsy to survive a picture with you.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"My parents did just well enough so that I could grow up poor around white people. To be honest, when Nas and them talk about the projects, nigga, I used to get jealous. Because it sounded fun. Everybody in the projects was poor, and that's fair. But if you were poor in Silver Spring, nigga, it felt like it was only happening to you. Nas does not know the pain of that first sleepover at a white friend's house. You'd come back home on Sunday and just look at your parents like, "Y'all need to step your game up. Everything in Timmy's house works.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"I was in Portland, Oregon, and I was checked in a hotel under the name Charles Edward Cheese. I came back to my room late at night, and there was a note; it was like a letter on my desk. It was addressed to "Mr. Cheese." So, obviously, I'm gonna assume that whoever wrote this letter must be an intimate friend of mine; this is not some kind of name that a person would just guess. But then I open the letter, and it turns out I don't know this person at all. It's a fan letter. You know, I'm not even used to the idea that I have fans, but I'm grateful for it. And uh, and even though I'm grateful for fans, I... I don't read those letters. Be nice if I did, but realistically, it's like, "What am I, Santa Claus, nigga? I don't have time for this. I got shit I wanna do. I'm trying to chill.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"You know how I know I'm getting old? This is embarassing, but... I was in my hotel room. I was... I'm not gonna lie, I was jerking off. And I was, like, really sweating it out. And this is when I knew I was old: I just gave up in the middle, like nothing even happened. Like, I don't like looking at my dick anymore. My dick looks distinguished. It's old, an old-looking dick. It's got salt-and-pepper hair all around it. My dick looks like Morgan Freeman in the 90s. Without the dots. My dick narrates, "Dave pulled me out and started jerking me around, jerking me around. But not with the same vigor as when he was young. He and I both knew nothing was coming out.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"My oldest son ... let me tell you, this kid is only sixteen years old, listen to what he did to me. This motherfucker calls me up in the middle of the night, it was one o'clock in the morning. He goes, "Dad, don't be mad." I knew something was terribly wrong. I said, "What's going on?" He said, "Listen, I'm fine. And don't forget, you told me to do this. I'm at a party, and my designated driver had too much to drink. Me and my friends need you to come pick us up." I said, "Jesus Christ, it's one o'clock in the morning, nigga. I am shitfaced." But then I figured, fuck, it's better me than some kid. I might as well roll the dice and go pick my nigga up. I said, "Alright, I'm coming to get you. Just give me the address and I'll be right there." And then he gave me the address, and I was - I was shocked. I said, "Son, you are not gonna believe this, but I'm at the same party, nigga.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"This motherfucker grabbed the podium, he goes, "You don't know how scary the things I read in my briefings are." And I was like, "Holy shit, man. You ain't supposed to tell us that, bro." That's bad leadership. Even as a parent, you think I'm gonna sit my kids down like, "Hey, little man, come here real quick, I just wanna holler at you for just a second. Yo, um... I'm three months behind on the rent, nigga, and I. am. worried. Very worried. But go on, go to school and have a productive day, nigga. I was just thinking out loud, getting some shit off of my chest.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Phew. Well, it's the last show. Here we are. Los Angeles. The world capital of... rape and dick breath. The fuck has been going on out here? Keeps getting worse. Just when you think it can't get worse, they got Charlie Rose today. It's going to be a quiet morning on the news tomorrow. Charlie Rose? Who's next, Captain Kangaroo? Everybody is raping like hotcakes. I, for one, am starting to get worried. You know, I've been in show business 30 years. I had no idea how much danger I was in. It's really some scary shit."

- Dave Chappelle

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"With reconstruction, black people did great. My great-grandfather was a very wealthy man. But then the black codes came, Jim Crow came, and it was a hundred years of unspeakable oppression again. Lynchings, all kinds of terroristic acts to keep us in the margins of society. And yet, we still fought. And Dr. King was born. And then, things got better. Twenty years after Dr. King was assassinated, Michael Jackson was moonwalking on television. Something something something, Barack Obama."

- Dave Chappelle

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"You know who's the most uncomfortable motherfucker in the room? The nigga that's right. I was right at an orgy once. Nobody fucked me. I was just walking around like Tom Cruise at the movies, just looking, and ruined the whole orgy by accident. It's easier to ruin an orgy than you think. All you gotta do is wait for it to get kind of quiet and then go "Eww.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"You ladies were right. To be honest with you, your lives look terrifying to me. They do. Man, I know nothing about being a woman, but I know fear. Yo, I used to live in New York when I was 17, and I couldn't even pay my bills. You know what I did to make money? I used to do shows for drug dealers that wanted to clean their money up. One time I did a real good set, and these motherfuckers called me in the back room. They gave me $25,000 in cash. I was probably 18, 19 years old. I was scared. I thanked them profusely, I put that money in my backpack, I jumped on the subway and started heading towards Brooklyn at one o'clock in the morning. Never been that terrified in my life, because I'd never in my life had something that somebody else would want. I thought to myself, "Jesus Christ, if these motherfuckers knew how much money I had in this backpack, they'd kill me for it." Then I thought, "Holy shit. What if I had a pussy on me all the time?" That's what women are dealing with. I'm gonna tell you right now, this is real talk. If them same drug dealers gave me a pussy and said, "Put this in your backpack and take it to Brooklyn," I'd be like, "Nigga, I can't accept this.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"That's a cold game. That's the motherfucking capitalist manifesto, and that's why I went to South Africa. So now we got us a little secret, bitch."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Never in a million years will you hear somebody on the radio say "I'm up for runnin' up on them crackers in city hall.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"The worst thing to call somebody is "crazy". It's dismissive. "I don't understand this person, so they're crazy." That's bullshit. 'Cuz people are not crazy. They're strong people. Maybe the environment is a little sick."

- Dave Chappelle

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"The mark of greatness is when everything before you is obsolete, and everything after you bears your mark."

- Dave Chappelle

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"You can't get un-famous. You can get infamous, but you can't get un-famous."

- Dave Chappelle

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"There's more shootings than I can literally count. You can't even go to the goddamn zoo without seeing a shooting nowadays. They shot a gorilla at my local zoo. And the Cincinnati police said, "Shooting that gorilla was the toughest decision this department ever had to make." I said, "Well, you're about to see a lot of niggas in gorilla costumes in Cincinnati.""

- Dave Chappelle

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"Chappelle, do you know what comes up when you Google your name, bro? That's the legacy? Your legacy is a bunch of opinions on trans shit? It's an odd hill to die on"

- Dave Chappelle

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"I’m a genderqueer, autistic, vagina-wielding white person. There could be a really interesting conversation between us, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s good faith on his part. He’s done three specials grinding down on the same points without any change in nuance, so I just think he’s on his track."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chapelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view."

- Dave Chappelle

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"Welcome back! If you're wondering where our good friend -- Kevin Eubanks couldn't be here. Kevin is on tour. He's in France right now. He called me today and he's over there and he wouldn't be back until next week. So if you're wondering where Kevin Eubanks is, he's with us in spirit certainly. Okay. Boy, this is the hard part. I want to thank you, the audience. You folks have been just incredibly loyal. (emotionally) This is tricky. (laughs) We wouldn't be on the air without you people. Secondly, this has been the greatest 22 years of my life. (applause) I am the luckiest guy in the world. I got to meet presidents, astronauts, movie stars, it's just been incredible. I got to work with lighting people who made me look better than I really am. I got to work with audio people who made me sound better than I really do. (voice breaking) And I got to work with producers! And writers! (choked pause) And just all kinds of talented people who make me look a lot smarter than I really am. I'll tell you something. First year of this show, I lost my mom. Second year, I lost my dad; then my brother died. And after that, I was pretty much out of family. And the folks here became my family. Consequently, when they went through rough times, I tried to be there for them. The last time we left the show, you might remember we had the 64 children that were born among all our staffers that married. That was a great moment. And when people say to me, hey why don't you go to ABC? Why don't you go to FOX? Why don't you go…? I didn't know anybody over there. These are the only people I have ever known. I'm also proud to say this is a a union show. And I have never worked (applause) -- I have never worked with a more professional group of people in my life. They get paid good money and they do a good job. And when the guys and women on this show would show me the new car they bought or the house up the street here in Burbank that one of the guys got, I felt I played a bigger role in their success as they played in mine. That was just a great feeling. And I'm really excited for Jimmy Fallon. You know, it's fun to kind of be the old guy and sit back here and see where the next generation takes this great institution, and it really is. It's been a great institution for 60 years. I am so glad I got to be a part of it, but it really is time to go, hand it off to the next guy; it really is. And in closing, I want to quote Johnny Carson, who was the greatest guy to ever do this job. And he said, I bid you all a heartfelt good night. Now that I brought the room down, hey, Garth, have you got anything to liven this party up? Give it a shot! Garth Brooks!"

- Jay Leno

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"106 [degrees] in the valley… I was sweating like Dan Rather checking for forged documents."

- Jay Leno

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"I was in the ROTC. Of course, ROTC stood for "Running off to Canada"."

- Jay Leno

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"How many watched the President's speech last night? [half-hearted audience applause] How many watched American Idol? [thundering applause] Okay, there you go! You get the government you deserve."

- Jay Leno

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"So China's president [Hu Jintao] meets, uh— meets America's president. It's like President "Who?" meeting President "Huh?"."

- Jay Leno

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"A new poll shows that Americans now believe that Bill Clinton is more honest than President Bush. […] At least when Clinton screwed the nation, he did it one person at a time."

- Jay Leno

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"And some sad news… the first lesbian couple to legally get married in the state of Massachusetts has split up. They cited irreconcilable similarities."

- Jay Leno

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"Stephen Hawking is getting a divorce. That's scary. If the smartest guy in the world can't figure out women, we're screwed."

- Jay Leno

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"Afterwards, President Bush said, "Maliki is the right man for the job." Just to remind you, Bush also said FEMA's Michael Brown was the right man for the job, Donald Rumsfeld was the right man for the job, Tom DeLay was the right man for the job… which would be okay if Bush was the right man for the job."

- Jay Leno

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"Now, today is the day we honor, of course, the Presidents, ranging from George Washington, who couldn't tell a lie, to George Bush, who couldn't tell the truth, to Bill Clinton, who couldn't tell the difference."

- Jay Leno

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"Women will soon be able to make their own sperm using their own bone marrow. Is that unbelievable? How unfair is that for us guys, huh? I mean, all these years, we've been in charge of manufacturing and distribution, you know what I'm saying? We provide free delivery and installation…"

- Jay Leno

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"No, they said they do not believe in evolution, then they said the biggest threat to America: religious radicals living in the Dark Ages."

- Jay Leno

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"Fred, what happened to your ass?" "Oh, the fat guy at the office sneezed on me."

- Jay Leno

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"I didn't realize it was October until I saw the Chicago Cubs choking."

- Jay Leno

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"How many of you watched the vice presidential debate expecting Sarah Palin to screw up? Be honest. [cheers and applause] : And how many of you watched the debate expecting Joe Biden to screw up? [more cheers and applause] : And how many of you watched the baseball game knowing the Cubs would screw up? [more applause]"

- Jay Leno

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"[about the Chicago Cubs being swept by the L.A. Dodgers in the 2008 NLDS]: How about next year, we only let the Cubs play using steroids?"

- Jay Leno

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"Folks, tomorrow America will get to hear those four words we've been waiting for: "Former president George Bush"."

- Jay Leno

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"Hillary says she has been tested. Well, I hope so. You never know what Bill might bring home."

- Jay Leno

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"And as you know, this whole Hillary e-mail scandal brought Anthony Wiener back into the news. Now here's a question nobody has asked. Anthony Wiener is Jewish, right? Right? So does this scandal make him a Hebrew National Wiener?"

- Jay Leno

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"The economy is so bad, two Milwaukee men were arrested this week for trying to join ISIS. Did you hear their excuse, they said, "Hey! Nobody else is hiring!" THAT'S how bad it is!"

- Jay Leno

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"The economy is so bad, I saw Matthew McConaughey talking to himself in a Kia! THAT'S how bad it is!"

- Jay Leno

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"Well, there's nothing funnier to me than the French. The French Resistance is probably the biggest mythical joke that ever existed. There were four guys in the French Resistance. They couldn't hand over the Jewish people fast enough. Oh, please, don't tell me about the French. The French have all sorts of secret deals with Saddam and everybody else for two cents a liter. It's an easy target."

- Jay Leno

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"French troops arrived in Afghanistan last week, and not a minute too soon. The French are acting as advisers to the Taliban, to teach them how to surrender properly."

- Jay Leno

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""This is now the twelfth day of rioting in France. They have been rioting for almost two weeks. And France has still not surrendered. That's like a record."

- Jay Leno

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"Congratulations to the Italian people for winning the World Cup. … They won after France’s best player got ejected for head butting. That’s the closest anyone in a French uniform has come to combat in 60 years"

- Jay Leno

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"In America, we like everyone to know about the good work we're doing anonymously."

- Jay Leno

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"Racecar driving is a lot like sex; all men think they're good at it."

- Jay Leno

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"There were just things in Disney movies that probably were too scary for kids."

- Paul Reubens

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"There were nude pictures... a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art."

- Paul Reubens

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"Does anyone come back from this? I don't know the answer to that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let this destroy me."

- Paul Reubens

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"Please accept my apology for not going public with what I've been facing the last six years. I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you."

- Paul Reubens

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"The key word for me on him is "inspiration." He is a leader by inspiration. He sets an example. It's quite important that people realize that I don't see him as a glad-handing show-off, a one-man vigilante force who rights every wrong. Basically, he's a pacifist, a man who comes along and says, 'What can I do to help?' He stands on the sidelines until there is real trouble. He does not want to get involved unless it's absolutely necessary because he thinks people should learn to make their own decisions."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Somewhere in Time, while it errs on the side of pretentiousness, is an absolutely honest attempt to create an old-fashioned romance. It's based on love rather than on sex or X-rated bedroom scenes. I don't know how to talk about a love story without getting all gooey about it, but the script excited me because of the situation of the leading character... His problem struck me as that of many people. They've got everything going for them, or so they say, except for a real commitment, a real love."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology. It's an archetype, watered down and made in vivid colors for twelve-year-old's mentality. It's pop mythology, which extends to the actor, then seeps over to a demand that that actor reflect the needs of the worshipers. The worship doesn't only go on in the temples — it goes on in the streets, and restaurants, in magazines. But, you know, I'm from New Jersey, I'm not from Olympus or Krypton, so back off 'cause I can't take the responsibility."

- Christopher Reeve

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"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable."

- Christopher Reeve

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"I'm starting a new chapter in my life, and you have no idea how much that means."

- Christopher Reeve

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"We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them."

- Christopher Reeve

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"When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them."

- Christopher Reeve

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"What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely."

- Christopher Reeve

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"In 1984, the government spent zero dollars on AIDS research, because AIDS was thought to be a death sentence, and the virus was far too complicated to deal with. Today, the government spends annually $1.8 billion a year on research, and people who would have been dead four or five years ago now have the virus virtually undetectable in their bloodstream, and they're living normal lives. That was something thought impossible until we put money and talent together and aimed it toward a problem."

- Christopher Reeve

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""Neglect - even misstatement - of recent scientific data was also evident in last year's testimony before this subcommittee by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Mr. Reeve, on behalf of the Foundation, testified that adult stem cells are no substitute for embryonic cells because they cannot be "pluripotent" but are confined to a narrow range of specialization. Yet a few weeks after that hearing, researchers funded by the NIH and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation published a study indicating that adult bone marrow stem cells "may constitute an abundant and accessible cellular reservoir for the treatment of a variety of neurologic diseases." The first sentence of the published study states: "Pluripotent stem cells have been detected in multiple tissues in the adult, participating in normal replacement and repair, while undergoing self-renewal. The authors cite eleven other studies in support of this observation. Their article, prepared under the aegis of Mr. Reeve's foundation, was received for publication in March 2000, before Mr. Reeve testified in April that adult stem cells cannot be pluripotent."

- Christopher Reeve

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"With the life expectancy of average Americans heading as high as 85 to 90 years, it is our responsibility to do everything possible to protect the quality of life of the present and future generations. A critical factor will be what we do with human embryonic stem cells. These cells have the potential to cure diseases and conditions ranging from Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis to diabetes and heart disease, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, even spinal-cord injuries like my own. They have been called the body's self-repair kit. Their extraordinary potential is a recent discovery. And much basic research needs to be done before they can be sent to the front lines in the battle against disease. But no obstacle should stand in the way of responsible investigation of their possibilities. To that end, the work should be funded and supervised by the Federal Government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That will avoid abuses by for-profit corporations, avoid secrecy and destructive competition between laboratories and ensure the widest possible dissemination of scientific breakthroughs. Human trials should be conducted either on the NIH campus or in carefully monitored clinical facilities. Fortunately, stem cells are readily available and easily harvested. In fertility clinics, women are given a choice of what to do with unused fertilized embryos: they can be discarded, donated to research or frozen for future use. Under NIH supervision, scientists should be allowed to take cells only from women who freely consent to their use for research. This process would not be open ended; within one to two years a sufficient number could be gathered and made available to investigators. For those reasons, the ban on federally funded human embryonic stem cell research should be lifted as quickly as possible. But why has the use of discarded embryos for research suddenly become such an issue? Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings, or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?"

- Christopher Reeve

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"Specific to spinal cord injured patients, immuno-suppressive drugs are not an option in a stem cell transplant procedure because of the increased risk of side effects. Spinal cord injuries cause many individuals to be more susceptible to respiratory infection due to an inability to clear secretions, limited chest movement, and a need for ventilation assistance. In addition, there is a greater risk of bladder infection and sepsis due to chronic catheterization. Some spinal cord patients who incur an infection are further compromised by the infection seeding around the heart. Urinary tract infections and skin breakdowns due to immobility are common causes of dsyreflexia, an event which often triggers heart attacks and strokes. I have been told by Dr. John McDonald of Washington University in St. Louis, that because this immune system of a spinal cord patient is already so compromised, it would be irresponsible to transplant stem cells into an individual that did not match his or her own DNA. Although there is still a risk of rejection, no reputable doctor would prescribe Cyclosporin, the leading immuno-suppressive drug therapy, to a spinal cord injured patient because the risk of death is too great. Somatic cell nuclear transfer could dramatically improve the treatment efficacy of any stem cell transplant because it uses one's own genetic makeup. In addition, there is the potential of eliminating the risks and side effects associated with highly toxic immuno-suppressive agents."

- Christopher Reeve

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"The budget of the National Institute of Health in 1998 was 12 billion dollars. However, due to Congress and also got pressure applied by a number of disease groups, the budget for fiscal 2003 will be 27.2 billion dollars. And human ... HHS Secretary Thompson has said there is plenty of money available for the kind of research. Doubling the budget of the NIH and more within five years has been an extraordinary accomplishment. So to say that there isn't ... I mean, more money would be nice, but to say there's not enough money to do research into therapeutic cloning is a false statement."

- Christopher Reeve

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"In the early '80s, the public discourse about AIDS was divisive and ugly. Some elected officials said the disease was God's revenge on people who lived a certain lifestyle. The federal government wouldn't fund research for a cure. But, today, the NIH spends $1.8 billion on AIDS research annually, and the virus is no longer an epidemic in this country. So, how did we get from that climate of fear and animosity in the early '80s to where we are today? Well, it's by the extraordinary efforts of ordinary individuals, then change occurred, as it has time and time again throughout our history."

- Christopher Reeve

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"It gives me a moral compass. I often refer to Abe Lincoln, who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do. The Unitarian believes that God is good, and believes that God believes that man is good. Inherently. The Unitarian God is not a God of vengeance. And that is something I can appreciate."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Perhaps it is my job to offend some scientists. I'm not asking them to be reckless or unprofessional, but I do want to reinforce a sense of urgency."

- Christopher Reeve

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"What I do is based on powers we all have inside us; the ability to endure; the ability to love, to carry on, to make the best of what we have — and you don’t have to be a ‘Superman’ to do it."

- Christopher Reeve

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"When I met with the President in May of 1996, he stated that the ratio of research to clinical results is greater in this country than anywhere else in the world. Money spent on research brings practical results that absolutely justify the investment. Let's look at a few examples. NIH-sponsored research has resulted in the identification of genetic mutations that cause osteoporosis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. Effective treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) has been developed and today nearly 80 percent of children diagnosed with ALL are alive and disease-free after 5 years. Because of research, the nature of medicine is changing. We are approaching disease at the cellular level. We are targeting problems earlier, more specifically, less intrusively, with greater success and fewer side effects. Advances in genetics will soon let us intervene in disease before symptoms appear."

- Christopher Reeve

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"We must not stop this progress because we are unwilling to commit enough money to get the job done. It is imperative that the public--and more importantly our elected representatives understand that research today is not speculative. It is not a waste of money. It is the only way to relieve suffering while helping to save the American economy at the same time. Making this a reality demands an investment of real dollars--funds that just don't fit within the constraints of the Budget Agreement passed by Congress this week, which proposes to reduce overall health spending by $100 million next year and by more than $2 billion over the next 5 years."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[R]ecent experience has shown that even the most formidable lobbyists cannot derail legislation that has bipartisan and public support. The NRA was not successful in repealing the ban on assault weapons. The American public watched in disbelief as a dozen tobacco company executives testified at a Senate hearing that nicotine is not addictive and denied allegations that nicotine levels were being raised in cigarettes in order to increase addiction. Now we are witnessing the demise of the "Marlboro Man" and "Joe Camel". There are lawsuits in virtually every state by individuals demanding punitive damages against the tobacco companies. Just this week, thousands of government workers petitioned the President to ban smoking in government buildings. I sincerely doubt that the tobacco lobby will be able to stop this initiative. The religious right led by Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and the Christian Coalition tried twice unsuccessfully (in 1992 and 1996) to hijack the Republican Party and failed in both attempts. Here again, was a case when a supposedly powerful lobby did not succeed in promoting their agenda."

- Christopher Reeve

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"The insurance companies see this legislation as a tax. My question is: why is that unreasonable, particularly when the insurance companies would save so much money in the long run. Research will keep the American people healthier, resulting in fewer insurance claims. We tax oil companies and use the money to build and maintain highways. In New York state, if you win the lottery, you pay a significant tax which goes to a state fund for education. Most states have sales taxes which are a major source of revenue for a wide variety of programs and services that benefit the public. Why shouldn't insurance companies be asked to help solve the health care crisis in this country? Because of the advances to date, we can save millions of lives. Our challenge for the future is not just improving the quality of life of those we save, but finding the cures to prevent that suf-fering in the first place. Our scientists are on the threshold of major breakthroughs in almost every disease or condition that now cause so much hardship for people across the country and around the world. The insurance companies owe it to our families and our society to make a small sacrifice which can do so much good. I hope that this excellent piece of legislation which already has tremendous grassroots support will be enacted during this legislative session."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Now fortunately, even a couple of years before my injury, we were in the dark ages about spinal cord and the common wisdom was that the cord could not regenerate. But I want to say that one of the great heros and really the father of regeneration is a distinguished Canadian who will go down in history as the father of spinal cord recovery. And that is Professor Alberto Aguierro at McGill University. He is the one who discovered that there are two protein molecules at the base of the brain stem. The positive function of these molecules is to stop the brain from overdeveloping during gestation. But then in the adult these protein molecules perform a negative function, they stop the regeneration of nerves in the spinal cord. Now you can chop off your hand then a surgeon can sew it back on again and you can go out and throw a baseball, because of the plasticity and ease with which the peripheral nervous system is able to make appropriate connections. And the good news now for us is that they have discovered nerves regenerate in the spinal cord they seek to find appropriate connections across the injury, across the lesion. And when these appropriate connections are made there will be improvement in sensation and in motor function and depending on the severity of the injury, there are endless possibilities to how much recovery can occur. If someone has been very damaged there may be limitations, if someone is less damaged there may be a better outcome. But the point is, through regeneration the use of human embryonic cells, the use of gene therapy, the spinal cord can and will regenerate and so it is only a question of time before these techniques make their way into humans. One of the most exciting discoveries was made by a Dr. Viscovi in Milan who found that there are cells called epitomal cells which were thought to only exist in again, in the child during gestation, because these cells are undifferentiated and they can become anything. Well, very recently, just two months ago these cells were found to exist in the adult in the ventricles of the brain, in the spinal cord and even in the skin. And this is tremendously exciting because the hope, the best hope for recovery now, is to biopsy these cells from your skin, from your hand for example, they could grow hundreds of thousands of cells in a petri dish and genetically instruct them to become neurons and axons. They would then be injected inside of the injury and they would become the nerves necessary to carry messages from the brain to the rest of the body. Now that would have been science fiction a few years ago, but it's here and it's happening and it doesn't matter whether it's an acute injury or a chronic injury. So I offer you the specific detail, not to give you a boring science lecture but to tell you there is very real tangible hope, very real hope...And one of the great advantages of this technique is that there is no danger of toxicity to the body or rejection by the immune system. And what I love about it is the body is healing itself. Taking cells from one part and using them in another area and I think that's some-how a beautiful design, rather than loading up the body with more chemicals and more drugs and more artificial agents."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[I]t seems to me that this past century has accomplished two Civil Rights movements. First, the right for blacks and Hispanics and people from all different nationalities to take their place in the middle of society and that has been achieved at great cost. It is a tremendous struggle in America, but now we think nothing of walking into an office and finding that a black person is the president of the company instead of a janitor cleaning the hallways. And then we learned that the talent that blacks and Hispanics have, always had, their intelligence, dedication and willingness to work is no less than anybody else. They have been able to persevere and finally I think we have really overcome tremendous amounts of prejudice, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The second great Civil Rights movement was equality for women. It started at the end of the last century. Women finally got to vote. We've gotten all the way to the point now where women aren't expected to stay home and just be mothers and it's okay to be a single parent and it's okay to go out and pursue your ambition and your dreams. And that's been a very important breakthrough because there are so many areas where women are more talented and have more to offer than men do. And now we are beginning to see everybody working side by side in society and in the workplace. But, there remains one HUGE minority that is still terribly discriminated against. And that population is the disabled population. And that comprises 1/5 of the world's population. In the United States, for example, we have 54 million disabled people and the thing that's very difficult is when blacks and Hispanics and women were fighting for equal rights there was a level of discomfort. But nothing approaching what happens when "normal" people look at the disabled and are uncomfortable. That is a prejudice that they MUST overcome because we're not in a position to always look our very best or to feel our very best, or to be pleasing to the eye because we have suffered terrible debilitating diseases and injuries. But what's happening now is the kind of discrimination that is so bad and I want to tell you that it exceeds any prejudice that ever occurred before in the previous civil rights movements."

- Christopher Reeve

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"When people project and understand that in an instant and as they grow older they face Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, MS, strokes, all the diseases of the brain and central nervous system, which will effect the entire population as we get older. People begin to realize hey I'm lucky, I'm just temporarily not disabled. So, the point is we're beginning to see equality, we're beginning to see new opportunities and that brings me to the other part we've already talked about, acceptance and the other part is denial. And what I mean by that, and everybody has to work it out for themselves, my point of view may not be your point of view, so please hold onto your belief and let me hold onto my belief. But my belief is that there is nothing we can't accomplish if we set our minds to it."

- Christopher Reeve

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"I've always been a practical person, not one to waste time pursuing unrealistic goals or dreams. But today's dreams can soon become tomorrow's reality in biomedical research. Scientists studying how the brain's cells and chemicals develop, interact, and communicate with the rest of the body have been making strides in alleviating the suffering of patients with Alzheimer's, strokes, Parkinson's, and MS, as well as brain and spinal cord injuries. Only recently researchers have dis-covered that stem cells, which have the ability to adapt to any environmentt in the body, will probably be the most important factor in curing all of these conditions. For example, in order to repair the damaged spinal cord, stem cells can be extracted from the ventricles of the brain or from bone marrow and genetically engineered to become nerve tissue. Highly successful experiments on mice have shown that when these transformed stem cells are transferred into the site of the injury, they apparently understand that their mission is to replace the damaged circuitry, which causes significant functional recovery. Mice that have had their spinal cords completely transected have been able to walk confidently across tightropes and climb rope ladders after this treatment. You would think that these breakthroughs would be a cause for celebration throughout the disabled community. In scientific terms, we are very close to achieving the impossible; in practical terms, we have a long way to go. But it is very disheartening to hear a leading researcher announce, "give us a hundred million dollars and we can cure Parkinson's"; or, "if we raise 300 million dollars, we can find a cure for paralysis in 5 years instead of 15." The idea of spending 15 more years in a wheelchair being fed, dressed, and washed by others would be tolerable if the scientists were still in the dark and there was no hope of recovery. I think most disabled people would agree with me that it is very difficult to cope psychologically with the stark reality that our future now depends mostly on money."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[W]hile the budget for research is negotiated annually on Capitol Hill, Alzheimer's has crippled 4 million Americans. This disease alone costs our nation 100 billion dollars every year and this number is expected to rise dramatically as baby boomers continue to age. Parkinson's afflicts nearly half a million Americans and costs us at least 6 million a year. Another half million Americans suffer strokes each year, costing more than 30 million in medical treatment, rehabilitation, and long-term care. Diabetes afflicts nearly 16 million people. It is the leading cause of blindness, kidney disease, and limb amputations; and it costs our nation between 90 and 140 billion dollars a year."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Sitting in a chair for more than 4 years now has given me plenty of time to think about many of the distorted and irrational values in our society. For example, all the researchers now agree that the damaged spinal cord can and will be repaired. But, they caution, recovery will only benefit the fittest. This means that the patient must exercise diligently to prevent muscle atrophy, and the loss of bone density and cardiovascular capacity. Special equipment ranging from electrodes that stimulate muscle groups, tilt tables that allow people to stand and bear weight, exercise bicycles, and treadmill therapy, which enables even a quadriplegic to walk while suspended in a harness, are all available. When the cure comes and signals from the brain once again reach the body, individuals who have kept in shape will be able to be rehabilitated relatively quickly and will no longer need payments from their insurance company. But no company will pay for this proactive therapy which would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. So most spinal cord injury victims simply deteriorate while they continue to fight for basic quality of life coverage. Meanwhile, the CEOs of many insurance companies are making salaries in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars a year. How much profit is reasonable and justifiable? The same distortion of values is evident in entertainment, sports, and politics. Why do studios pay some of their biggest stars 20 million dollars a picture? Does even the most gifted athlete deserve 91 million dollars over 7 years to swing a bat and catch a baseball? Why is it that so many of our elected officials end up in office primarily because they have been able to outspend their opponents? At the other end of the spectrum, why has the NIH since its inception in 1940 had to plead incessantly for enough money to battle every disease in the encyclopedia?"

- Christopher Reeve

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"The prosperity that we've enjoyed in the 90's has spawned a new breed of individuals who have amassed tremendous fortunes at a very young age. Many of them have reaped the rewards of a stock market that seems to have no upper limit. Others have moved swiftly into the fast lane of the information superhighway, and achieved a net worth in the billions long before their 40th birthday. Often they literally don't know what to do with that much money. Unfortunately, philanthropy is not something many of them perceive as an important responsibility of the wealthy. While of course there are a number of notable exceptions, too many of these young billionaires become obsessed with privacy and are more likely to build half a dozen homes in different parts of the world than to give back to society. In the early years of this century, the notion of what it meant to be a "gentleman" informed the actions of the very rich - the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and the like. They too built "cottages" in Newport, and enjoyed their yachts. But they also created foundations, endowed universities, built hospitals and libraries, and donated land for public use. I don't think it's a wild stretch of the imagination to believe that if they knew that 300 million dollars would cure paralysis in 5 years instead of 15, they would have reached for their checkbooks. But we must not wallow in nostalgia for the Gilded Age, when in fact, there is so much potential in the present. Ten corporations could each give 30 million dollars without any undue hardship. When people ask me what are my hopes and dreams for the new Millennium, my answer is I hope technology will not diminish genuine human contact and compassion. I still believe that when people really make the effort to understand each other, the possibilities are limitless. The solutions to the problems we will face in the 21st century --- such as overpopulation, the environment, education, and disease --- will only be achieved by every one of us doing our part. We must appeal to the government, the private sector, venture capitalists, corporations of all sizes, and every individual who can only afford to give 5 dollars to help further the cause. You in the media can lead the way by creating awareness and affecting public opinion. In the last hundred years, we invented the automobile, the airplane, and weapons of mass destruction. We journeyed to the moon and built shiny new cities throughout the country. We concerned ourselves with material success, convenience, and a higher standard of living. Now it's time for America to take care of its own. The life expectancy for Americans has practically doubled over the course of this century. Now it is our responsibility to ensure that from cradle to grave, these years are ones of quality and productivity, not pain and suffering. The time is now, at the dawn of a new Millennium."

- Christopher Reeve

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"For the record, I am a C-2 ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, which means that I am paralyzed from the shoulders down and unable to breathe on my own. For the last 7 years, I have not been able to eat, wash, go to the bathroom, or get dressed by myself. Some people are able to accept living with a severe disability. I am not one of them, and that is why I have a keen interest in research and am deeply disturbed by unreasonable attempts to block scientific progress. The fact that the House of Representatives banned cloning last year without careful deliberation makes the Senate debate a matter of great urgency."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Today, 100 million Americans suffer from serious or currently incurable diseases. Fifty-four million Americans are disabled. Our Government is supposed to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Beyond that, we have a moral responsibility to help others. Time is absolutely critical. If the Government forces scientists' attempt to make adult stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells, they might waste 5 years or more and fail. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands will have died. Why do we need therapeutic cloning? As a layman, several important reasons come to mind. One, implantation of human embryonic stem cells is not safe unless they contain the patient's own DNA. Two, efforts, to repair central nervous system disorders may need to recapitulate the process of fetal development, and that could only be accomplished by human embryonic stem cells. Three, therapeutic cloning is done without fertilizing an egg. It can be strictly regulated. If we also enforce an absolute ban on reproductive cloning, we will not slide down the dreaded slippery slope into moral and ethical chaos. Any powerful new technology comes with the possibility for abuse. But when we decide that the benefit to society is worth the risk, we take every possible precaution and go forward. The unfertilized eggs that will be used for nucleus transplantation will never leave the laboratory and will never be implanted in a womb. But if we do not make this research legal, if we do not use Government funding and oversight, it will happen privately, dangerous, unregulated and uncontrolled. And our country is about to lose its preeminence in science and medicine. We took a giant step backward in the 1970's when the NIH was not allowed to fund its in vitro research until an advisory commission could be formed to consider the issue. In the meantime, there was rapid progress in England, and the first test tube baby was born in 1978. For purely political reasons, we did not succeed and so far, 177,000 children have been conceived in 400 facilities around the country."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Today, human trials to defeat Parkinson's are underway in Sweden. In Israel, macrophages, scavenger cells that eat debris in the body, are being used to repair the damaged spinal cord within 2 weeks of injury. The first human subject was a 19-year-old girl from Colorado. Last week, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom passed legislation permitting research on cloned human embryos for the second time. Those are not rogue nations behaving irresponsibly. They are allies, no less moral than we are."

- Christopher Reeve

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"If you believe in the slippery slope here, it means that our entire society is perched on the slippery slope. It means that regulation has no value whatsoever, and that is not true. Now, there are always consequences. We allow 16-year-olds to get driver's licenses, and a lot of them have accidents - but do we rescind the permission to drive a car at 16? No."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[J]ust on a daily basis, the Government is saying to people that, yes, there is a threat of terror, but fly and go to the theater and live your life and take that risk, because every day, you hear about fighter escorts having to take some airplane back to the airport because there was another bomb threat. People are boarding airplanes, passing security checkpoints, and then found to be carrying dangerous material - but still we go on. So yes, you take a risk that somebody somewhere could get involved in creating a human out of reproductive cloning, but it is not at all likely, and to be afraid of pursuing therapeutic cloning is really going to be reprehensible, because you cannot use embryonic stem cells for therapy without being able to use therapeutic cloning — it will not work."

- Christopher Reeve

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"I need to object, and that is that, Senator, you insist on separating therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells. However, in my own case, I require re-myelination of nerves. That means replacing the conductive coat of fat, myelin, that allows electricity to come down, currents from the brain to the central nervous system for function. At the moment, only embryonic stem cells have the potential to do that, and experiments are being done now in larger animals demonstrating that."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[A] scientist at Washington University, Dr. John McDonald, whom I have been working with says that there is no way he would inject stem cells without being able to use my own DNA for safety reasons. So without the ability to use my own DNA, without that somatic cell transfer, I am out of luck. The other thing is to please remember that therapeutic cloning, nucleus transplantation, is done with unfertilized eggs. You keep referring to destroying an embryo. I think that destroying an embryo is what happens when the leftovers from fertility clinics are thrown out. We can agree that they go to the garbage routinely. But to say that an unfertilized egg has the same status, I believe is incorrect, and I think that this is the line of research that holds so much promise and can also get us around the ethical quandary that we keep putting ourselves in. We are talking about an unfertilized egg that will never leave the lab, that will never be implanted in a womb, and that can be regulated. And it is crucial for research."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[N]ever in the history of science have we been given such a gift of being able to use cells that can become any tissue or cell type in the body for the purpose of healing. I think that if you do not have the combination of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells, you are going to be condemning a lot of people to unnecessary and death. If I look around at what else is going on, for years just in the spinal cord community, there has been research on growth factors and Schwann cells, and there have been efforts to stop protein inhibitor, but they have not yet shown the same promise that the embryonic stem cells do, and at the moment, in two places, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California at Irvine, researchers have been conducting very successful experiments using human embryonic stem cells in animal models in both the acute and chronic phases and getting recovery. Of course, they are going to have to move to the higher animal forms before humans, but the promise is absolutely extraordinary, and I cannot think of any other kind of therapy that would be as effective and as promising as this is. And when I read articles or hear people say that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is dubious, I am very disturbed, because the only reason they get to say that is because the NIH has not been allowed to spend a single dollar on embryonic stem cell research. They have a budget now of $25 billion, and yet, because of lack of guidelines and because of the restrictions that have been imposed on the NIH so far, not one human embryonic stem cell project has been federally funded. That is why you are seeing such slow progress. And if we continue that way, I am going to be in this wheelchair for a long time that I do not need to be, and others like me."

- Christopher Reeve

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"If nucleus transplantation, aka therapeutic cloning, is banned, it will be a tremendous setback for science, and it will be indefinitely ... it will indefinitely prolong the suffering of hundreds of millions around the world, who are afflicted with wide variety of diseases and disabilities."

- Christopher Reeve

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"I work with Dr. John McDonald at Washington University in St. Louis, and he is a very knowledgeable researcher on (Inaudible) stem cells, and a few years ago he said to me that in order to cure my particular condition, which is demyelination of nerves in a very small area of the spinal cord, right at the second cervical vertebrae, that if you imagine the rubber coating around a wire that allows conductivity of electricity, the same thing as with nerves, myelin is like that rubber coating. It's a fatty substance that if it comes off of the nerves, then signals do not go from the brain down to the spinal cord as required. However, it is possible, and he's demonstrated this as graphic(?) as possible, to re-myelinate. Now, a few years ago, he said, we would be willing to inject human embryonic stem cells into you and hope for the best. But hoping for the best is a very dangerous proposition for people with spinal cord injuries because our spinal cord injury affects every organ in the body, and the most serious side effect is that it severely compromises the immune system, so spinal cords patients, particularly with high level injuries like mine, are prone first to pneumonia, which I've had at least five times since my injury, many patients often die from that. Also, it compromises the cardiovascular system, compromises the digestive tract, the ... your whole bowel-bladder-sexual function, skin integrity and also bone density, so that osteoporosis becomes a very ... a very critical factor. So literally he said to me that the immunosuppression that would be required just to inject 30million human embryonic stem cells from an anonymous donor might kill me. And now, he would be unwilling as a doctor, because of the ethics involved that a doctor is ethically bound to give his patients the best possible treatment, he would not inject me with embryonic stemcells unless we go the other route, which is therapeutic cloning- taking an egg, removing the nucleus, taking DNA from my skin and deriving stem cells from that, which would be injected in a manner that would probably not be rejected by my immune system. So my future, and others would agree, many scientists would agree, my future, in terms of being able to recover will depend on some way of delivering stem cells without compromising my immune system and therapeutic cloning, which would use my DNA is the best hope."

- Christopher Reeve

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"[Y]ou have to understand that therapeutic cloning is a very nascent technology that's not ready for use in humans. But knowing that it will not . . . provided our scientists are allowed to go ahead with the research, it really shouldn't take that long before they're ready for humans. However, knowing that there is a better technology out there than just using embryonic stemcells, he as a doctor feels, given the immune rejection problem for people with spinal cord injuries, he's not going to go ahead, as he had planned to. There was a plan to actually use embryonic stem cells as soon as it would be allowed by the FDA. He is not going to do that until therapeutic cloning gets to the point where it could be applied to humans. And I just want to make one other very quick comment and that is in England, just a month ago, Dr. Ann Bishop, who works with the tissue engineering corporation over there, was able to take mouse embryonic stem cells that derived . . . had been made obviously therapeutic cloning, and they turned those cells into tissue that is applied to the lungs, to deficient cell types or cell tissues in the lungs, and said, have already reported, I guess it's public knowledge, that they feel they are now ready to do it in humans, so the idea that it would be decades before you could get to human application, I think that is one example I'm giving you right now of the fact that that's not true. I can give you another example. Doctor Oswald Stewart, of the Reeve Research Center, UC Irvine has said that you could probably get to the use of therapeutic cloning in humans within about three to five years. So I absolutely dispute the time line that's been put up before."

- Christopher Reeve

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"On the other hand, you have to understand that our allies are not rogue nations. The U.K., Australia, Canada, Singapore, Israel, India, these are just some of the countries that have already passed therapeutic cloning. In fact, England passed it twice. The House of Lords considered it, passed it, the pro-life groups objected to it, they took time to listen to those groups and then they passed it a second time. And therapeutic cloning is allowed with strict government oversight. And to say that those countries are less moral than we are, I think is hubris on our part that's out of control."

- Christopher Reeve

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"I believe, throughout history, there has been common agreement in societies around the world that the life results because of the union of male and female. Whether it's done in a test tube, or whether it's done through intercourse. And fertilized embryos in clinics are still the union, result of the union of male and female. Therapeutic cloning takes an egg that is not fertilized, and is left in the cellular stage, in the very early stages, about three to five, seven days, then the nucleus is removed and the DNA from a patient. Either male or female can be put into it. Now, that is an aberrant life form. If you were to take it further and implant it, then only insane people would want to do that, in my opinion. But considering the fact that they're talking ... you're talking about the difference of life as we've understood it for hundreds of thousands of years, versus a collection of cells that will never become a human being, and I don't even believe deserves a status of the word embryo. It could be called a pseudo-embryo, it could be called, you know, some other name should come up from it, because just like test tube babies scared people before, the buzzword embryo scares people today. Cloning scares people today, but this is simply a manipulation of cells that are not equivalent to life as we've always known it."

- Christopher Reeve

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"He was the human voice that changed attitudes. It's one thing for scientists to say 'we know we can do this', but Christopher put all this into a real-life perspective. It's people like Christopher we desperately want to help."

- Christopher Reeve

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"It is sad that he did not live long enough to see the full benefits of the research for which he campaigned."

- Christopher Reeve

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"He was put on this Earth for ... a lot of reasons. He wasn't just here to be an actor. He was Superman."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Christopher Reeve is Superman, right here, right now... Reeve shows us the power, the possibilities and the results of a fierce and persistent commitment to growth and development. With God's help, Reeve is Superman because: 1. He survived the horse riding accident and challenged himself physically during countless months of painful physical therapy. 2. Because he remained committed to his role as a loving husband and doting father 3. Because he kept hope alive in the face of injury and paralysis that can destroy all hope-in the face of having to depend on his wife and many others to feed, wash, change, move and carry him to the doctor. 4. Because he came to the conclusion that God still had something for him to do... Christopher Reeve turned his focus away from his paralysis and began figuring out how he could live afresh. Reeve decided that a lot of people might like to hear his story. Instead of limiting the communication of his story to letters, books and videos subject to edit, Reeve chose the lecture circuit. That meant showing up in public, allowing the public to gawk at his incapacity, talking about his condition and sharing lessons learned. Thus, Christopher Reeve has become Superman for real."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Christopher was a hero to many people. We will continue in his honour to be steadfast in our goal of finding treatments and cures for paralysis."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Christopher Reeve has done an amazing job promoting responsible stem-cell research across the world."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Obama paid tribute to the late actor Christopher Reeve, who emerged as an advocate for embryonic stem cell research after he was paralysed in a horseriding accident. He said Reeve dreamed of being able to walk again, adding: "Christopher did not get that chance. But if we pursue this research, maybe one day - maybe not in our lifetime, or even in our children's lifetime - but maybe one day, others like him might.""

- Christopher Reeve

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"Reeve "appropriately brought a sense of urgency to this issue," said Perry, head of the research coalition, which favors stem cell science. "On Capitol Hill he was such a highly regarded figure and was so focused on the message.""

- Christopher Reeve

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"He put a [human]] face on the dreams. He used his star power as a celebrity for a great good that transcends anything that most of us will ever achieve."

- Christopher Reeve

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"He was able to inspire hope in patients with diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease ... tragic and life-threatening conditions that face tens of millions of Americans."

- Christopher Reeve

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"In a talk sponsored by the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group, actor Christopher Reeve said science, not religion, should drive the debate over stem cell research. Social and religious conservatives have robbed American scientists of their chance to play a leading role in the promising field of stem cell research, actor and writer Christopher Reeve said during a visit to the medical school in April. “We’re giving away our pre-eminence in science and medicine,” he said. “We’re going to lose incredibly valuable time. “When matters of public policy are being decided, no religion should have a seat at the table—that is what is provided for in the Constitution,” Reeve said. Yet religious conservatives, including the Pope, he said, “have an undue influence in the debate.” Because of their plasticity—their ability to differentiate into any cell in the human body—stem cells “have unlimited potential to cure disease,” Reeve told the crowd that filled the auditorium of the Anylan Center for Medical Research and Education. Reeve also hopes that stem cell research will lead to a cure for paralysis such as his, the result of a 1995 riding accident. In a talk sponsored by the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group, Reeve criticized President Bush’s order of August 9, 2001, restricting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to only 64 extant cell lines. (Last May, National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., acknowledged that only 11 of those lines were eligible for federal research funds.) Reeve suggested that the decision made no ethical sense in light of Bush’s objection to using embryos for research. “Those lines were derived from leftover embryos from infertility clinics. Did he suddenly develop a new morality effective August 10th?” Reeve noted that, although typically about a third of embryos are discarded as medical waste, even vocal opponents of using embryos for research have never suggested banning in vitro fertilization. “They know very well that you can’t go to a couple and say, ‘You can’t have a child this way.’”"

- Christopher Reeve

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"He was one of the leading figures who encouraged debate on the subject of human embryonic stem-cell research. We will miss his contribution."

- Christopher Reeve

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"While his fame originally lay with his acting, his efforts in support of stem-cell research since the horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him quadraplegic have deeply affected friends and commentators. Reeve became a vocal advocate for this research field. In stem cells, he saw a powerful tool being hampered by US policy, a tool that promised potential therapies, not just to heal himself, but to treat a host of medical conditions in others."

- Christopher Reeve

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"Reeve came to the stem-cell debate when the US was considering outlawing therapeutic cloning, a technique where stem cells are harvested from surplus fertilized eggs in fertility clinics. Such embryonic stem cells, it is thought, can be turned into any of the hundreds of cell types in the body. To its supporters, few medical technologies have held more promise, as such stem cells could potentially be used to replace damaged and diseased cells anywhere in the body. To its critics – and in Washington, that meant many Republicans and the religious right – the creation of embryos is morally repugnant. Reeve saw the resistance as a challenge. With an eye on the electorate, the Bush administration imposed strict controls on therapeutic cloning, declaring that, while private institutions could do whatever they wanted, federal funds could only be used to research stem cells created before 2001. Without the full weight of federal funding behind it, Reeve and many scientists felt stem cell research had been scuppered. He set up the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to fund some of the best research into therapies for paralysis, but the $15 million a year the foundation dedicated to research was just a fraction of what the US National Institutes of Health could have paid for, if the Bush administration had allowed it."

- Christopher Reeve

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"(Typical signoff) Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow."

- Tina Fey

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"Ashlee Simpson did a special performance at Mall of America this week. Reports from those present say that the venue was completely packed; I mean seriously, people were like sardines, wall to wall, there had to be like ten of them...all pushed up against the giant stage they constructed...in the janitor's closet. Because she sucks."

- Tina Fey

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"Despite explosive violence in the West Bank this week, negotiators remain hopeful that a U.S.-sponsored summit could end the conflict. Israeli and Palestinian officials say they are eager to sign an agreement so they can dip it in gasoline, light it on fire and throw it at each other."

- Tina Fey

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"Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman say their split is amicable, and they want everyone to know that after the divorce is final, their two adopted children will be returned to the prop department at Universal Studios."

- Tina Fey

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"New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is once again expressing outrage at an art exhibit, this time at a painting in which Jesus is depicted as a naked woman. Said the mayor, "This trash is not the sort of thing that I want to look at when I go to the museum with my mistress.""

- Tina Fey

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"In order to feel safer on his private jet, actor John Travolta has purchased a bomb-sniffing dog. Unfortunately for the actor, the dog came six movies too late."

- Tina Fey

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"It was announced that Ricky Martin will perform at the Lincoln Memorial as part of President Bush's inauguration. Apparently, Mr. Bush's first step in restoring the dignity of the presidency is having a soap star sing "She Bangs" at the foot of the Great Emancipator."

- Tina Fey

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"Gale Norton, President Bush's controversial nominee for Secretary of the Interior, told a Senate committee this week, "I intend to make the conservation of America's national treasures my highest priority." At the top of her list is the American Bald Oil Magnate."

- Tina Fey

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"In Washington last week, officials from the National Rifle Association met with a group of 200 high school students. There were no survivors."

- Tina Fey

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"On Monday, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a terrorism warning asking all Americans to be on high alert this week. Then on Friday he announced that the period of high alert will be extended indefinitely. I think I speak for all Americans when I say: I can't be any more alert than I already am! Okay, I'm opening my mail with salad tongs, I take my passport into the shower with me. I'm watching so much CNN I'm having dreams about Wolf Blitzer. How 'bout this: you be on full alert. I'm gonna freeze my head like Walt Disney, and you can wake me up when everything's cool. Okay?"

- Tina Fey

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"Former pop singer Tiffany posed as the centerspread model for this month's issue of Playboy magazine. Tiffany, a devout Baptist, sat down with her young daughter and showed her a Cosmopolitan magazine saying "See honey? Mommy isn't nearly as classy as these ladies"."

- Tina Fey

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"According to a new study, women in satisfying marriages are less likely to develop cardiovascular diseases than unmarried women. So don't worry, lonely women, you'll be dead soon."

- Tina Fey

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"Despite the fact that Martha Stewart has disgraced herself too much to hold an official position at Omnimedia, the company may still use her name and images to sell their products. You know, sort of like Clinton and the Democrats."

- Tina Fey

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"At the request of the Catholic Church, a three-day sex orgy to be held near Rio de Janeiro was cancelled last Friday. So instead I spent the weekend cleaning my apartment. Organizers of the orgy were expecting 1500 men, and 8 women."

- Tina Fey

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"According to reports, Britney Spears has told family and close friends that she and her new husband Kevin Federline are expecting their first child. So far, no word on whether it will be a pimp or a ho."

- Tina Fey

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"Helmut Simon, who 13 years ago found the 5,000-year-old remains of a prehistoric man frozen in the ice of an Alpine glacier, has himself disappeared in the snow-covered Alps. Helmut, if you can hear me, don't give up. Help is on the way in five thousand years."

- Tina Fey

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"A man who had a heart attack while he was alone in his house was saved when his dog brought him the phone so he could call for help. However, it should be noted that for every one of these heartwarming stories, there's a million others where the dog just sits there like a idiot and watches you die."

- Tina Fey

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"Bill O'Reilly settled his sexual harassment suit out-of-court this week. This is what he had to say about it on Thursday's O'Reilly Factor:"

- Tina Fey

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"Hoping to court ex-New Yorkers living in Florida, the Bush campaign is running radio ads there, featuring former New York mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch. The ads begin, "Hiiii. We're the reason you LEFT.""

- Tina Fey

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"Well, today in New York, after months of build up and anticipation, Star Jones made history and became the first person ever to get married."

- Tina Fey

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"This week, penny collector Gene Sukie went to the bank and cashed in 10,000 pounds of pennies he had collected over 34 years, which were worth over 14,000 dollars. And, of course, I was in line behind him."

- Tina Fey

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"It was reported that Guy Ritchie has cast his wife Madonna in a small walk-on role in his new movie, Revolver. Madonna will play the part of the woman who ruins the film."

- Tina Fey

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"It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, 'if this is what it takes to win, it's not worth it.'"

- Tina Fey

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"The Washington State Supreme Court on Thursday announced a two year suspension for a lawyer caught having jailhouse sex with a triple murder defendant she was representing. Haha! Jokes on you, dummies...I'm not really a lawyer."

- Tina Fey

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"Bill Clinton's brother Roger was arrested this week for drunk driving in California and then was thrown out of a restaurant after threatening the doorman. Despite all this, Roger Clinton is still the least embarrassing member of his family."

- Tina Fey

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"SpongeBob SquarePants will begin airing in China in December so millions of factory workers can finally know what they’re making. But Chinese censors have ordered the name of the show be changed to "CleaningpadCharlie RectangleShorts""

- Tina Fey

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"Polaroid is warning customers not to listen to the part of the Outkast song Hey Ya! that tells people to "shake it like a Polaroid picture", because that could actually ruin the pictures. In a related story, Bacardi is warning shorties to be responsible and not “sip Bacardi like it’s Dey birfday.""

- Tina Fey

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"Two days before Britney Spears' HBO concert from Las Vegas, someone broke into her dressing room and stole the white, Elvis-inspired jumpsuit that she wore to promote the event. And you know what, I'm not giving it back! I keep it now, it's mine!"

- Tina Fey

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"FOX is developing a new reality dating series called Playing it Straight, in which a female contestant will date 14 bachelors, some of whom are gay, and some are straight. The show was originally called The Tina Fey College Experience."

- Tina Fey

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"CBS announced that will not air moveon.org's winning anti-Bush ad during the super bowl, saying that they don't air so-called "issue ads." Unless the issue is that girls are sluts for beer."

- Tina Fey

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"A recent study announced that 52 per cent of all teens who sign virginity pledges recant them within twelve months. If I'm on my game."

- Tina Fey

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"MTV announced this week that the next season of The Real World will be shot in Detroit, as will several cast members."

- Tina Fey

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"NBC announced this week that they will be producing a 3 hour TV movie based on the life of Rudolph Giuliani. To keep the movie real to life, the Giuliani character is really unlikeable until the last 15 minutes, when everyone loves him."

- Tina Fey

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"In an interview, Paris Hilton said that of her and her sister, "People love to hate us. But when you know us, you love us. And if you really get to know us, you get gonorrhea.""

- Tina Fey

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"Wafah Dufour bin Laden, niece of Osama bin Laden has signed a contract to star in a reality show...called Skating with the Nieces of Terrorists."

- Tina Fey

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"Maxim magazine recently released its annual hot 100 list, with Eva Longoria at #1, followed by Jennifer Garner and Lindsay Lohan. While I, once again, was ranked between Bonnie Hunt and Joy Behar."

- Tina Fey

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"At the upcoming Grammy Awards, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony will perform together as the first time, as man and wife. Hopefully music."

- Tina Fey

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"If these two are tired of having stuff with each other, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

- Tina Fey

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"Brokeback Mountain was released last weekend. Its notable for being the first Western where the good guys get it in the end."

- Tina Fey

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"Question number one is from someone who calls himself "The Controvert." He says, "Hi, Tina, I love you in the show. In my humble opinion, when a show pushes the boundaries, you end up with a lot of passionate people on both sides. What do you think of the criticism the show gets?" I think that people who say they love the show and they think it's great and they write good reviews of it, are-are correct and that people who don't like the show for any reason are probably-they're just confusing it with Studio 60."

- Tina Fey

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"This is, uh, from "RedSoxGirl02," um, so that person is four years old, I guess, 'cause their thing is "02.""

- Tina Fey

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""I can't believe you recently had a baby. How do you do it?" [pause] The baby starts to come down...and once that happens you can't-it comes out. Whether you let it or not, the baby comes out. So that's how I did it."

- Tina Fey

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Actresses from Pennsylvania• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States•
""Do the NBC bigheads really pay attention to these message boards?" Um, I don't know if they read the message boards. I hope so, because I write fifty to a thousand fake posts a week, mostly, uh, saying that I'm really good and that no else is as good as me. So, I hope they listen to that because I'm trying to get a raise."

- Tina Fey

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""So, Alec Baldwin; great actor or greatest actor?" I'm gonna say "greatest actor"; Greatest...living...American...actor...in...the Baldwin family...by a mile."

- Tina Fey

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Actresses from Pennsylvania• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States•
"They made a porn movie about Sarah Palin, and the same actress, Lisa Ann, played me in the porn version of 30 Rock. Weirdly, of the three of us, Lisa Ann knows the most about foreign policy."

- Tina Fey

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"On Matthew McConaughey: "He was always taking his shirt off, he's like "Yeah, here's my deal, I'm hot." We had a meeting one day at like 11 o'clock, right before the show and he walks into the meeting shirtless wearing this like old musty sarong... He doesn't smell great, no.""

- Tina Fey

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"On 30 Rock and Studio 60 and the Sunset Strip airing in the same year: "We’ll probably end up doing a terrible crossover, where the Matthew Perry character on the drama rapes my character on the comedy—and then the ‘Law & Order’ team solves the crime.""

- Tina Fey

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"It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good."

- Tina Fey

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"If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs."

- Tina Fey

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Actresses from Pennsylvania• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States•
"Who are you inspired by? Creative people who have made their seemingly most self-indulgent artistic whims into a career."

- Steve Purcell

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"A zebra can't drive a moon-buggy. Or any other sort of car for that matter."

- Steve Purcell

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"Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people — because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it — I don't care how good you are."

- Bruce Lee

• 0 likes• Bruce Lee• Actors from San Francisco• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"When I look around I always learn something, and that is to be yourself always, express yourself, and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. Now that seems to be the prevalent thing happening in Hong Kong, like they always copy mannerism, but they never start from the root of his being and that is, how can I be me?"

- Bruce Lee

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"You know what I want to think of myself? As a human being. Because, I mean I don't want to be like "As Confucius say," but under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family. It just so happens man that people are different."

- Bruce Lee

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"When you're talking about fighting, as it is, with no rules, well then, baby you'd better train every part of your body!"

- Bruce Lee

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"All types of knowledge, ultimately mean self knowledge."

- Bruce Lee

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"When I look around, I always learn something: to be always yourself, and to express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it."

- Bruce Lee

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"Boards don't hit back."

- Bruce Lee

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"A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract; and when he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, "I" do not hit, "it" hits all by itself."

- Bruce Lee

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"Don't think, feel....it is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!"

- Bruce Lee

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"Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system."

- Bruce Lee

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"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

- Bruce Lee

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"Forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely — lay your life before him."

- Bruce Lee

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level."

- Bruce Lee

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"Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."

- Bruce Lee

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"For a moment The surrounding utters no sound. Time ceases. The Paradise of Dreams come true."

- Bruce Lee

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"Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve its end."

- Bruce Lee

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"When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow — you are not understanding yourself."

- Bruce Lee

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"Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there."

- Bruce Lee

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"Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion."

- Bruce Lee

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"To contemplate a thing implies maintaining oneself OUTSIDE it, resolved to keep a distance between it and ourselves."

- Bruce Lee

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"Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing.'"

- Bruce Lee

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"If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love."

- Bruce Lee

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"The happiness that is derived from excitement is like a brilliant fire — soon it will go out. Before we married, we never had the chance to go out to nightclubs. We only spent our nights watching TV and chatting. Many young couples live a very exciting life when they are in love. So, when they marry, and their lives are reduced to calmness and dullness, they will feel impatient and will drink the bitter cup of a sad marriage."

- Bruce Lee

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"Of course you’re there. Death is always there. So why was I afraid? Your leap is swift. Your claws are sharp and merciful. What can you take from me which is not already yours? . . . Everything I have done until now has been fruitless. It has led to nothing. There was no other path except that it led to nothing — and before me now there is only one real fact — Death. The truth I have been seeking — this truth is Death. Yet Death is also a seeker. Forever seeking me. So — we have met at last. And I am prepared. I am at peace. Because I will conquer death with death."

- Bruce Lee

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"Neither. I think of myself as a human being."

- Bruce Lee

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"The Three Stages of Cultivation — The first is the primitive stage. It is a stage of original ignorance in which a person knows nothing about the art of combat. In a fight, he simply blocks and strikes instinctively without a concern for what is right and wrong. Of course, he may not be so-called scientific, but, nevertheless, being himself, his attacks or defenses are fluid. The second stage — the stage of sophistication, or mechanical stage — begins when a person starts his training. He is taught the different ways of blocking, striking, kicking, standing, breathing, and thinking — unquestionably, he has gained the scientific knowledge of combat, but unfortunately his original self and sense of freedom are lost, and his action no longer flows by itself. His mind tends to freeze at different movements for calculations and analysis, and even worse, he might be called “intellectually bound” and maintain himself outside of the actual reality. The third stage — the stage of artlessness, or spontaneous stage — occurs when, after years of serious and hard practice, the student realizes that after all, gung fu is nothing special. And instead of trying to impose on his mind, he adjusts himself to his opponent like water pressing on an earthen wall. It flows through the slightest crack. There is nothing to try to do but try to be purposeless and formless, like water. All of his classical techniques and standard styles are minimized, if not wiped out, and nothingness prevails. He is no longer confined."

- Bruce Lee

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"Using no way as way; Having no limitation as limitation."

- Bruce Lee

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"In Jeet Kune Do, it’s not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly that counts. ‘Being’ is more valued than "doing"."

- Bruce Lee

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"You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it — it’s there. When you want to move — you are moving. And when you move, you are determined to move! Not accepting even one inch less than 100 percent of your honest feelings. Not anything less than that. So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself into. To become one with your feelings so that, when you think — it is."

- Bruce Lee

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"In life, what more can you ask for than to be real? To fulfill one’s potential instead of wasting energy on [attempting to] actualize one’s dissipating image, which is not real and an expenditure of one’s vital energy. We have great work ahead of us, and it needs devotion and much, much energy. To grow, to discover, we need involvement, which is something I experience every day — sometimes good, sometimes frustrating. No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness."

- Bruce Lee

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"None whatsoever."

- Bruce Lee

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"To be perfectly frank, I really do not."

- Bruce Lee

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"I believe in sleeping."

- Bruce Lee

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"There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day."

- Bruce Lee

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"I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help— doing one’s best, dedicating one’s self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an ongoing process. I have done a lot during these years of my process. A swell in my process, I have changed from self-image actualization to self-actualization, from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc. to searching internally for the cause of my ignorance."

- Bruce Lee

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"Whether or not we can get together, remember well that art “lives” where absolute freedom is. With all the training thrown to nowhere, with a mind (if there is such a verbal substance) perfectly unaware of its own working, with the “self” vanishing nowhere, the art of JKD attains its perfection."

- Bruce Lee

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"You must have complete determination. The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite off your nose no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are he will succeed in doing it. He may be severely beaten up, too, but that will not stop him from carrying out his objective. That is the real fighter."

- Bruce Lee

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"Jeet Kune Do rejects all restrictions imposed by form and formality and emphasizes the clever use of the mind and body to defend and attack."

- Bruce Lee

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"An instructor should exemplify the things he seeks to teach. It will be of great advantage if you yourself can do all you ask of your students and more."

- Bruce Lee

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"As an instructor, you must be able to distinguish between poor performance caused by lack of ability or aptitude on the part of the student and poor performance caused by lack of effort. You should treat the first with patience and the latter with firmness. You must never apply sarcasm and ridicule."

- Bruce Lee

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"Even today, I dare not say that I have reached a state of achievement. I'm still learning, for learning is boundless."

- Bruce Lee

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"The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is."

- Bruce Lee

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"Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact."

- Bruce Lee

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"Faith is a state of mind that can be conditioned through self-discipline. Faith will accomplish."

- Bruce Lee

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"Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe."

- Bruce Lee

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"Possession of anything begins in the mind."

- Bruce Lee

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"Thoughts are things."

- Bruce Lee

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"Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal."

- Bruce Lee

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"The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible."

- Bruce Lee

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"The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits."

- Bruce Lee

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"I'm in the midst of preparing my next movie, Enter the Dragon a coproduction between Concord and Warner Bros., plus another Concord production, The Game of Death, which is only halfway done"

- Bruce Lee

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"Emptiness the starting point. — In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty."

- Bruce Lee

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"Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier."

- Bruce Lee

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"Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is."

- Bruce Lee

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"The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems."

- Bruce Lee

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"The aphorism "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he" contains the secret of life."

- Bruce Lee

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"Meaning is found in relationship. — Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to the background."

- Bruce Lee

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"Life is never stagnation. It is constant movement, unrhythmic movement, as we as constant change. Things live by moving and gain strength as they go."

- Bruce Lee

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"Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning."

- Bruce Lee

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"The primary reality is not what I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think."

- Bruce Lee

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"The timeless moment. — The "moment" has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time."

- Bruce Lee

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"Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement."

- Bruce Lee

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"To realize freedom the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness — care for watching, but don't stop and interpret "I am free," then you're living in a memory of something that has gone before."

- Bruce Lee

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"To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever."

- Bruce Lee

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"Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of."

- Bruce Lee

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"Be aware of doing your best to understand the ROOT in life, and realize the DIRECT and the INDIRECT are in fact a complementary WHOLE. It is to see things as they are and not to become attached to anything — to be unconscious meant to be innocent of the working of a relative (empirical) mind — where there is no abiding of thought anywhere on anything — this is being unbound. This not abiding anywhere is the root of our life."

- Bruce Lee

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"Concentration is the ROOT of all the higher abilities in man."

- Bruce Lee

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"Seek to understand the root. — It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branch, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming."

- Bruce Lee

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"What we are after is the ROOT and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds "body feel" and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity."

- Bruce Lee

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"Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and NOTHING is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you'll be flexible to change with the ever changing. OPEN yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the TOTAL OPENNESS OF THE LIVING MOMENT. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo."

- Bruce Lee

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"You cannot force the Now. — But can you neither condemn nor justify and yet be extraordinarily alive as you walk on? You can never invite the wind, but you must leave the window open."

- Bruce Lee

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"The Moment is freedom. — I couldn't live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them."

- Bruce Lee

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"The Now is indivisible. — Completeness, the now, is an absence of the conscious mind to strive to divide that which is indivisible. For once the completeness of things is taken apart it is no longer complete."

- Bruce Lee

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"The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality — to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle."

- Bruce Lee

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"In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no "things." NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is "no-thingness". We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, an nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness — no-thingness — is a form of process, ever moving."

- Bruce Lee

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"What IS is more important than WHAT SHOULD BE. To many people are looking at "what is" from a position of thinking "what should be.""

- Bruce Lee

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"Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. — We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted."

- Bruce Lee

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"True thusness is without defiling thought; it cannot be known through conception and thought."

- Bruce Lee

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"Reality is apparent when one ceases to compare. — There is "what is" only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful."

- Bruce Lee

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"Reality is being itself. — It is being itself, in becoming itself. Reality in its isness, the "isness" of a thing. Thus isness is the meaning — having freedom in its primary sense — not limited by attachments, confinements, partialization, complexities."

- Bruce Lee

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"A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred — the human law in himself, his own individual will."

- Bruce Lee

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"One should be in harmony with, not in opposition to, the strength and force of the opposition. This means that one should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous; the important thing is not to strain in any way."

- Bruce Lee

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"The dualistic philosophy reigned supreme in Europe, dominating the development of Western science. But with the advent of atomic physics, findings based on demonstrable experiment were seen to negate the dualistic theory, and the trend of thought since then has been back to the monistic conception of the ancient Taoists."

- Bruce Lee

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"If thought exists, I who think and the world about which I think also exist; the one exists but for the other, having no possible separation between them. Therefore, the world and I are both in active correlation; I am that which sees the world, and the world is that which is seen by me. I exist for the world and the world exists for me. … One sure and primary and fundamental fact is the joint existence of a subject and of its world. The one does not exist without the other. I acquire no understanding of myself except as I take account of objects, of the surroundings. I do not think unless I think of things — and there I find myself."

- Bruce Lee

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"When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist."

- Bruce Lee

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"Taoist philosophy … is essentially monistic. … Matter and energy, Yang and Yin, heaven and earth, are conceived of as essentially one or as two coexistent poles of one indivisible whole."

- Bruce Lee

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"Voidness is that which stands right in the middle between this and that. The void is all-inclusive; having no opposite, there is nothing which it excludes or opposes. The all illuminating light shines and is beyond the movement of the opposites."

- Bruce Lee

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"Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win. But never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat — to learn to die — is to be liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and to harmonize. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. You must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying."

- Bruce Lee

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"True thusness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of true thusness. There is no thought except that of true thusness. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible."

- Bruce Lee

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"Liberate yourself from concepts and see the truth with your own eyes. — It exists HERE and NOW; it requires only one thing to see it: openness, freedom — the freedom to be open and not tethered by any ideas, concepts, etc. … When our mind is tranquil, there will be an occasional pause to its feverish activities, there will be a let-go, and it is only then in the interval between two thoughts that a flash of UNDERSTANDING — understanding, which is not thought — can take place."

- Bruce Lee

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"Balance your thoughts with action. — If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done."

- Bruce Lee

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"Concepts vs. self-actualization. — Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves."

- Bruce Lee

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"Life is better lived than conceptualized. — This writing can be less demanding should I allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I've come to understand that life is best to be lived — not to be conceptualized. If you have to think, you still do not understand."

- Bruce Lee

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"Knowledge will give you power, but character respect."

- Bruce Lee

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"What you HABITUALLY THINK largely determines what you will ultimately become."

- Bruce Lee

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"Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. — To realize that it's just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up."

- Bruce Lee

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"The change is from inner to outer. — We start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer conditions."

- Bruce Lee

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"Choose the positive. — You have choice — you are master of your attitude — choose the POSITIVE, the CONSTRUCTIVE. Optimism is a faith that leads to success."

- Bruce Lee

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"Cease negative mental chattering. — If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed."

- Bruce Lee

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"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."

- Bruce Lee

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"Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail."

- Bruce Lee

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"Research your own experience; absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is essentially your own."

- Bruce Lee

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"When asked what the difference between a karate punch and a kung-fu punch was during his first U.S. screen test in 1965, Bruce Lee replied, “Well, a karate punch is like being hit by an iron bar—whack! A kung-fu punch is like being hit by an iron ball swung on an iron chain with an iron ball attached to the end—it goes WHANG!—and it hurts inside.” Then he stood up and showed exactly what that might look like in a flurry of hands and feet moving so fast they blurred."

- Bruce Lee

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"Bruce Lee was grateful to those who helped his career. When The Green Hornet was cancelled, he wrote to producer William Dozier to say, "I like to take this opportunity to thank you personally for all that you've done to start my career in show business. Without you, I would never have thought about being in Hollywood. I've gained tremendous experience from the Green Hornet and believe I've improved steadily since the first show----that of minimizing and hacking away the unessential.""

- Bruce Lee

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"The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart; if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease."

- Bruce Lee

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"When I was having dinner with Chuck Norris I did ask him: "If you and Bruce would be in a real fight to death, who would win?", and he said without thinking: "Bruce of course. Nobody can beat him.""

- Bruce Lee

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"Bruce Lee lived martial arts every day! He could do things in the martial arts that others could not. He was very friendly and outgoing and usually the center of attention. We met after the national championships in 1964 during a dinner. Because I had just won the championship, he immediately challenged me. He said, "I want to challenge you to an arm wrestling match." I thought this guy barely weighs 120 pounds soaking wet. This will be simple, and I immediately accepted his challenge. Then he said, "But we’re going to arm wrestle — Chinese style." I agreed since I really thought I could take him any way that he wanted to wrestle. At the time, I weighed about 225 pounds to his 120 pounds. So we got to it, and I will confess that trying to twist his arm was like trying to twist a piece of steel! He looked at me and smiled while I was giving it all I had. Then he just dumped me over like it was nothing at all. He was quite a martial artist– the best I’ve ever seen. Yet with skill that masterful, he was always very warm and friendly — the kind of guy everyone wanted to meet."

- Bruce Lee

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"I wouldn't have put a dime on anyone to beat Bruce Lee in a real confrontation. Bruce Lee was the best street fighter I ever saw, even to this very day, and not just pound for pound — but against anyone in a real fight."

- Bruce Lee

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"His martial art skills made Lee arguably the greatest martial artist of his time — or any other."

- Bruce Lee

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"The story was particularly serious . . . I know Bruce Lee from secondary school in Nigeria. I come from Ghana, and there has always been a race, a loving rivalry between two countries. So I was picked on. Every child who is bullied, has an imaginary hero. I had several, and Bruce Lee was the greatest. Every little boy has a little bit of Bruce Lee in him."

- Bruce Lee

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"There's no doubt in my mind that if Bruce Lee had gone into pro boxing, he could easily have ranked in the top three in the lightweight division or junior-welterweight division."

- Bruce Lee

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"The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography."

- Bruce Lee

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"I wanted to do in boxing what Bruce Lee was able to do in the martial arts. Lee was an artist and, like him, I try to get beyond the fundamentals of my sport. I want my fights to be seen as plays."

- Bruce Lee

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"In a dictionary, you say "greatest", you say "Bruce Lee", that's the way it is. He is second to no one."

- Bruce Lee

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"When Bruce Lee kicked, you don't shut your eyes. Because when you shut your eyes, you cannot see Bruce Lee kick it's so fast! Human beings cannot move like cartoon [sound effects], that's the fastest you can be. Even Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson, their punches are fast, but you still can see [them]."

- Bruce Lee

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"If Bruce Lee wasn't the greatest martial artist of all time, then certainly he is the number one candidate."

- Bruce Lee

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"I considered him by far the greatest. And for those who don't considering him the greatest, at least he is the top candidate for being actually the greatest."

- Bruce Lee

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"Every kid, I believe, in America noticed that guy behind The Green Hornet— the one who could kick, the one who could punch, the one who could move so amazingly—all eyes centered on him. … The makers of The Green Hornet had to actively restrain Bruce Lee from being himself because they realized every time they saw the rushes that everything else was wiped off-screen."

- Bruce Lee

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"I truly liked and admired Bruce. I worked with him some and he helped me in my foot movement and back fist. Bruce probable weighed 135 pounds at most, but he could hit like a mule. I know, because he knocked me under Sharon Tate’s barstool at Columbia Pictures in 1968. Bruce never confronted any big men to my knowledge. There are stories out there, but none I personally know of. I will say this; I would have picked Bruce in any street situation. He had the knowledge and the attitude to carry him through anything."

- Bruce Lee

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"I remember many times my father (Ed Parker) talking about, pound for pound, Lee was the best martial artist, he'd ever seen."

- Bruce Lee

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"Bruce Lee is my idol. I need to learn some techniques of Bruce Lee, especially the quickness of his hands and legs."

- Bruce Lee

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"Actually, the father of mixed martial arts, if you will, was Bruce Lee. If you look at the way Bruce Lee trained, the way he fought, and many of the things he wrote, he said the perfect style was no style. You take a little something from everything. You take the good things from every different discipline, use what works, and you throw the rest away."

- Bruce Lee

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"The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"The reason movies are often so bad out here isn't because the people who make them are cynical money hacks. Most of them are doing the very best they can; they really want to make good movies. The trouble is with their heads, not their hearts."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? ... Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"Think [Schindler's List] was about the Holocaust?... That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘'Schindler’s List’' is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?"

- Stanley Kubrick

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"There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"Include utter banalities."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"Is it good or bad? Is it necessary? Can I get rid of it? Does it work?"

- Stanley Kubrick

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"[Kubrick] always said that it was better to adapt a book rather than write an original screenplay, and that you should choose a work that isn't a masterpiece so you can improve on it. Which is what he's always done, except with Lolita."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"I love almost all of Stanley Kubrick, there’s almost no Stanley Kubrick I don’t love. I love Lolita, I love Dr. Strangelove. I love A Clockwork Orange, obviously. I even like a lot of Barry Lyndon (laughs). And early stuff, like The Killing and Paths of Glory. … It’s ridiculous. Look, he made the best comedy ever, he may have made one of the best science fiction movies ever, he made the best horror movie ever. I couldn’t watch the end of The Shining. I went through half The Shining for years before I could finish, because I’m a writer and as soon as he starts writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” I had to turn it off. It’s almost like Picasso in that he mastered so many different genres. … he took his time and patience and he had a crew of like 18 people. They were very handmade movies these were not large behemoths that he did; they were very thoughtful and his editing process was long. He’s kind of without peer really. If I was gonna settle on a director, probably Kubrick."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"You say, 'Gee, I wish he'd made more [films].' But these were enough. Because there's so much in each one. You know, there's so much. Yeah, it would've been nice for him to have made more. But that's not the process. That wasn't his process, and what he did make was something so special and unique, it's like a different movie every time you see it."

- Stanley Kubrick

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"I'm not an "American First" (and maybe because I read science fiction) I'm a "Terran First". I'm a human being first. And I have this sympathy for other human beings no matter what side of the giant ice wall they happen to be born on."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the crudest is the one called love."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Been on the river thirty years, York. Rafted down to New Orleans when I was just a boy, and worked flatboats and keelboats both before steamers. I been a pilot and a mate and a striker, even a mud clerk. Been everything there is to be in this business, but one thing I never been, and that's a sharper."

- George R. R. Martin

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"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real... for a moment at least... that long magic moment before we wake. Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smoke-stacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever, somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle Earth."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps."

- George R. R. Martin

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"As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books... I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you."

- George R. R. Martin

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"There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take. I am much more a gardener than an architect."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him."

- George R. R. Martin

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"My reading of history has shown me that simply 'being a good man' is not enough. That there are many kings who are good men and yet bad kings. And even good kings sometimes make disastrous decisions. So government is complex, politics is complex."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Believe me, no one wants to finish this book more than me."

- George R. R. Martin

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"With great power comes great responsibility, Stan Lee once wrote. Spidey's credo articulates the basic premise of every superhero universe, including ours. But Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The tension between those two truths is where the drama comes in. My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I hear you jeering. Pfui. Those of you who know my work only from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE may not be aware that I was once considered the most romantic science fiction writer of the 70s, back when I was doing my Thousand Worlds stuff."

- George R. R. Martin

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"The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battle-axe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons. The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens. The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothick. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories."

- George R. R. Martin

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"The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and... they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this became cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Much as I admire Tolkien, and I do admire Tolkien — he’s been a huge influence on me, and his Lord of the Rings is the mountain that leans over every other fantasy written since and shaped all of modern fantasy — there are things about it, the whole concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling bad guys, Good versus Evil, while brilliantly handled in Tolkien, in the hands of many Tolkien successors, it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys. It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I think worship of death is an interesting basis for religion, because after all death is the one universal. It doesn't seem to matter what gods you pray to. We all die, in the real world and in fantasy worlds, and if there was some religion where you did not die I suspect that would be, that god would become very popular. They all promise us eternal life, but whatever."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, “Fly, you fools.” What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I think even during the campaign I said that Trump reminded me most of Joffrey. They have the same level of emotional maturity. And Joffrey likes to remind everyone that he's king. And he thinks that gives him the ability to do anything. And we're not an absolute monarchy, like Westeros is. We're a constitutional republic. And yet, Trump doesn't seem to know what that means. He thinks the presidency gives him the power to do anything. And so, yeah, Joffrey is Trump."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers... which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don't know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there's always been something in a twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has."

- George R. R. Martin

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"Historical processes have never much interested me, but history is full of stories, full of triumph and tragedy and battles won and lost. It is the people who speak to me, the men and women who once lived and loved and dreamed and grieved, just as we do. Though some may have had crowns on their heads or blood on their hands, in the end they were not so different from you and me, and therein lies their fascination. I suppose I am still a believer in the now unfashionable "heroic" school, which says that history is shaped by individual men and women and the choices that they make, by deeds glorious and terrible."

- George R. R. Martin

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"The battle between good and evil is a legitimate theme for a Fantasy (or for any work of fiction, for that matter), but in real life that battle is fought chiefly in the individual human heart. Too many contemporary Fantasies take the easy way out by externalizing the struggle, so the heroic protagonists need only smite the evil minions of the dark power to win the day. And you can tell the evil minions, because they're inevitably ugly and they all wear black. I wanted to stand much of that on its head. In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this: George R. R. Martin is not your bitch. This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now. People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines."

- George R. R. Martin

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"I saw Mr. Martin at Worldcon last year. And I almost went up to him and asked, “How have you gone this long without killing someone?” Because however much flak I happen to get from fans, he has to get a thousand times more. In my opinion, he's a saint. If I had to deal with that level of fan dickishness, I would have already lost my shit in some spectacular way. There would be a video of me on youtube, gone all berserk with nerd rage, holding someone up by the neck, shouting "I've got your sequel right here, bitch!""

- George R. R. Martin

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"Whenever we got to a George R. R. Martin script, you realized no one thinks like this guy. If the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ staff was a jazz quintet, George R. R. Martin was like John Coltrane, because he plays a solo and you go, ‘How did he do that? How did that juxtaposition of notes ever come into anybody’s head?’ George’s stuff was fluid and funky, weird and kinky, but also had this gravitas, this profound thought, that gave it weight and import. He’s one of the really, really good guys."

- George R. R. Martin

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"It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."

- George R. R. Martin

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"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."

- Jack Handey

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"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it."

- Jack Handey

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"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did.""

- Jack Handey

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"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man."

- Jack Handey

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"IF YOU ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone."

- Jack Handey

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"TO ME, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?" you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks.""

- Jack Handey

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"IF YOU GO through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance."

- Jack Handey

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"MAYBE in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Basically, it's made up of two separate words &mdash; "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind."

- Jack Handey

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"I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records."

- Jack Handey

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"Socializing on the internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama? That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there … it's not necessary to answer the question, "Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?" before you decide to listen to it and like it or not."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. " You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"The worst crime you can commit is telling the audience something they already know, in any fashion, even for a moment."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"The problem I had when I wrote The Social Network was that this thing that’s supposed to bring us closer together is pushing us further apart. It gives everyone the impression that everyone else in the world is having a better time, and that if you are not cataloging your life, then you’re not really living it. People are going to show you only pictures of themselves having a great time at the best party with the coolest people eating, for some reason, avocado toast. They’re also not going to experience empathy. When we’re a little kid on a playground and say something mean to another little kid, we see in their face what we did, and we feel bad because of it. On social media, it’s more like yelling at another driver from your car. People are developing a chemical addiction to their phones. A gambling addict feels that rush of dopamine and serotonin not when they win but when the roulette wheel is spinning. When kids stick their hand in their pocket to get their phone and see if someone has commented on the photo they posted, they get that rush of serotonin and dopamine. It’s a big deal. And now, when we talk about our concerns with Facebook, we’re talking about the power that it has to disseminate misinformation and disinformation. We’re never going to put this genie back in the bottle, but surely we can decide that lies are bad."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"Decisions are made by those who show up."

- Aaron Sorkin

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"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

- Norman Mailer

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"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

- Norman Mailer

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"The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination."

- Norman Mailer

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"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

- Norman Mailer

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"You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip."

- Norman Mailer

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"This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam."

- Norman Mailer

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"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."

- Norman Mailer

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"With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance."

- Norman Mailer

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"There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce."

- Norman Mailer

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"Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough."

- Norman Mailer

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"The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television."

- Norman Mailer

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"The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation."

- Norman Mailer

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"What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?"

- Norman Mailer

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"[The launch of Apollo 11]: For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames. No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville's Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville's Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound. Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, 'Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!' but not his voice, almost like the Italian girl saying fenomenal, and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears, hot in all the intimacy of a forming of heat, as if one's ear were in the caldron of a the vast burning of air, heavens of oxygen being born and consumed in this ascension of the rocket, and a poor moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God – the fire was white as a torch and long as the rocket itself, a tail of fire, a face, yes now the rocket looked like a thin and pointed witch's hat, and the flames from its base were the blazing eyes of the witch. Forked like saw teeth was the base of the flame which quivered through the lens of the binoculars. Upwards. As the rocket keened over and went up and out to sea, one could no longer watch its stage, only the flame from its base. Now it seemed to rise like a ball of fire, like a new sun mounting the sky, a flame elevating itself. [...] Now, through the public address system, came the sound of Armstrong talking to Launch Control. He was quieter than anyone else. 'Inboard cutoff' he said with calm in his voice."

- Norman Mailer

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"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube."

- Norman Mailer

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"We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards."

- Norman Mailer

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"The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you."

- Norman Mailer

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"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul."

- Norman Mailer

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"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."

- Norman Mailer

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"I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension."

- Norman Mailer

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"Culture is worth a little risk."

- Norman Mailer

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"Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before."

- Norman Mailer

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"We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods."

- Norman Mailer

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"Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce."

- Norman Mailer

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"Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit."

- Norman Mailer

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"When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write."

- Norman Mailer

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"Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."

- Norman Mailer

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"I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it."

- Norman Mailer

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"On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago."

- Norman Mailer

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"What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil."

- Norman Mailer

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"I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation."

- Norman Mailer

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"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be."

- Norman Mailer

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"Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer."

- Norman Mailer

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"I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for."

- Norman Mailer

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"The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism."

- Norman Mailer

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"Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice."

- Norman Mailer

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"For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …"

- Norman Mailer

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"You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical."

- Norman Mailer

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"I hate everything which is not in myself."

- Norman Mailer

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"A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past."

- Norman Mailer

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"The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety."

- Norman Mailer

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"To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder… The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates."

- Norman Mailer

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"There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God."

- Norman Mailer

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"And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood."

- Norman Mailer

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"He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere."

- Norman Mailer

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"Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march."

- Norman Mailer

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"You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast."

- Norman Mailer

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"He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea…. Hot dog!"

- Norman Mailer

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"Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock."

- Norman Mailer

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"The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful."

- Norman Mailer

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"There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality."

- Norman Mailer

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"What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war."

- Norman Mailer

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"The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet."

- Norman Mailer

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"There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."

- Norman Mailer

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"I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.""

- Norman Mailer

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"Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most."

- Norman Mailer

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"The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost."

- Norman Mailer

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"I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda."

- Norman Mailer

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"I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched."

- Norman Mailer

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"The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is."

- Norman Mailer

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"He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it."

- Norman Mailer

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"However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered."

- Norman Mailer

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"I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy." So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!"

- Norman Mailer

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"Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen."

- Norman Mailer

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"There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality."

- Norman Mailer

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"I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities."

- Norman Mailer

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"When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules."

- Norman Mailer

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"God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so."

- Norman Mailer

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"Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle."

- Norman Mailer

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"To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic."

- Norman Mailer

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"America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind."

- Norman Mailer

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"The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past."

- Norman Mailer

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""Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5"

- Norman Mailer

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"The hipster comes our of a muted rebellion of the proletariat, he is, so to say, the lazy proletariat. The beatnik - often Jewish - comes from the middle class, and twenty-five years ago would have join the YCL [Young Communist League]. Today, he chooses not to work as a sentence against the conformity of his parents. Therefore he can feel moral value in his good-bye to society. The hipster is more easygoing about the drag and value of a moneyless life of leisure."

- Norman Mailer

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"Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."

- Norman Mailer

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"Mysteries are irritated by facts."

- Norman Mailer

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"Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal."

- Norman Mailer

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"Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known."

- Norman Mailer

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"Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?"

- Norman Mailer

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"America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity."

- Norman Mailer

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"Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic."

- Norman Mailer

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"One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child."

- Norman Mailer

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"Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles."

- Norman Mailer

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"In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good."

- Norman Mailer

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"For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street."

- Norman Mailer

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"There was Johnson (Lyndon) who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. … Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver."

- Norman Mailer

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"Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been."

- Norman Mailer

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". Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice."

- Norman Mailer

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"Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation."

- Norman Mailer

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"The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man."

- Norman Mailer

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"America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes."

- Norman Mailer

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"It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. … It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love."

- Norman Mailer

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"The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self."

- Norman Mailer

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"A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself."

- Norman Mailer

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"Hitler … was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire."

- Norman Mailer

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"Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich."

- Norman Mailer

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"The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself."

- Norman Mailer

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"Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination."

- Norman Mailer

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"The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it."

- Norman Mailer

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"Hungry fighters win fights."

- Norman Mailer

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"Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others."

- Norman Mailer

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"All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination."

- Norman Mailer

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"There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable."

- Norman Mailer

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"One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love."

- Norman Mailer

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"Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation."

- Norman Mailer

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"It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do."

- Norman Mailer

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"A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped."

- Norman Mailer

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"In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent."

- Norman Mailer

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"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."

- Norman Mailer

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"A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat."

- Norman Mailer

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"In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell."

- Norman Mailer

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"I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses."

- Norman Mailer

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"At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre."

- Norman Mailer

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"I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 … We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz."

- Norman Mailer

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"I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation."

- Norman Mailer

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"Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual."

- Norman Mailer

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"The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another."

- Norman Mailer

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"Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches."

- Norman Mailer

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"I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity — it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind."

- Norman Mailer

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"Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it."

- Norman Mailer

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"Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward."

- Norman Mailer

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"The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world."

- Norman Mailer

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"Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied."

- Norman Mailer

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"We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd … Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?"

- Norman Mailer

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"We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again."

- Norman Mailer

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"There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements."

- Norman Mailer

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"Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."

- Norman Mailer

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"Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."

- Norman Mailer

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"There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away."

- Norman Mailer

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"What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil."

- Norman Mailer

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"His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style."

- Norman Mailer

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"There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

- Norman Mailer

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"New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities."

- Norman Mailer

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"West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon."

- Norman Mailer

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"It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there."

- Norman Mailer

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"Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood."

- Norman Mailer

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"Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind."

- Norman Mailer

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"I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous. But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash — that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen."

- Norman Mailer

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"I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are."

- Norman Mailer

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"I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history. They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think — this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it — that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better."

- Norman Mailer

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"We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything."

- Norman Mailer

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"It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man — I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world."

- Norman Mailer

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"I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be."

- Norman Mailer

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"I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that.""

- Norman Mailer

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"We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything."

- Norman Mailer

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"I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A.A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one."

- Norman Mailer

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"Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words."

- Norman Mailer

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"What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other — where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it."

- Norman Mailer

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"He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things."

- Norman Mailer

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"There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly. I just thought — this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is — I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used.""

- Norman Mailer

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"The idea to make New York City a state, in case you didn't know, is not original with me...Most people, however, will remember the statehood idea as it was first put forth in Norman Mailer's campaign for Mayor in 1969. He gave the idea some pzazz, but not enough people took it seriously."

- Norman Mailer

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"That's a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer; he, uh, donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study."

- Norman Mailer

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"How refreshing to go from Norman Mailer to Toni Morrison!"

- Norman Mailer

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"Alix Kates Shulman had no idea that its main principle, that "a woman and man should share equally the responsibility for their household and children in every way, from the insidiously unacknowledged tasks of daily life to the pleasures of guiding a young human to maturity," would cause such uproar. Reprinted in the debut issue of Ms., in Redbook (attracting two thousand letters), Life, a Harvard textbook on contract law, and other anthologies, it drew scorn from Norman Mailer, who famously mocked Shulman by declaring that he never would be married to a woman like her-he would never help his wife with the dishes!"

- Norman Mailer

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"(“It was reported somewhere recently that your friend Norman Mailer said to you, in anger: "You're little, you're ugly, and you're as black as the ace of spades." But your comeback was not recorded.”) Oh, I just laughed. After all, it's true. But the point is, why, after all these years, did he have to say it? I mean, it's his problem, really, and I think it has to do with the fact that like most white liberals-though I'm not accusing him of being one exactly-he has always lied to himself about the way he really feels about Negroes."

- Norman Mailer

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"if you are a success, you run the risk that Norman has run and that I run, too, of becoming a kind of show business personality. Then the legend becomes far more important than the work. It's as though you're living in an echo chamber. You hear only your own voice. And, when you become a celebrity, that voice is magnified by multitudes and you begin to drown in this endless duplication of what looks like yourself. You have to be really very lucky, and very stubborn, not to let that happen to you. It's a difficult trap to avoid. And that's part of Norman's dilemma, I think. A writer is supposed to write. If he appears on television or as a public speaker, so much the better or so much the worse, but the public persona is one thing."

- Norman Mailer

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"When you talk of Norman Mailer, right away I see van Gogh's work boots. Norman was a working man. Lord, did he work. From one end of his life to the other, he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire. He leaves them to a nation that has surrendered all its years to converting truth to an untruthful excuse for killing"

- Norman Mailer

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"Obviously, he was a great American voice."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was by nature bound to a style of excess … There were times when you would be fed up with him, but if you could conceive of American culture of the past 50 years without Norman Mailer, you would find it a lot drearier."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was really the great chronicler of his time, the champion of personal reportage. His output was prodigious, his range of interests very wide, from Marilyn Monroe to Picasso to the art of graffiti to extreme forms of crime. His vaunted life as a public figure may have actually impeded serious critical attention to much of his work. Presumably, it will be possible now."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was absolutely dauntless … He was quite weak in the end, but he still planned to write a seven-volume novel about Hitler."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was a very sweet-natured person, despite what some people think. And he was very very patient. I would take one of his manuscripts and make some suggestions and he would be very nice about it and say, "Yes, you've given me something to think about." And I would get the manuscript back and I would see that he had included none of my ideas"

- Norman Mailer

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"Norman was ferociously smart, and surprised me at one point when he went off on a rant about the English and quinine and tonic water by interrupting himself when he realised I was English and being desperately keen to make sure I hadn't taken offense — the opposite of the pugnacious image he'd acquired. I … owed an enormous amount of why-Sandman-was-taken-seriously-in-the-early-years to Norman's quote on the cover of Season of Mists, for which I shall be forever grateful."

- Norman Mailer

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"Norman was a splendid, surprising American writer, a good friend, a true New Yorker, and a man we will all miss. To me, it's like a thousand people just left the room. As a novelist, he never repeated himself, never succumbed to the temptation to write "The Naked and the Dead Go to Japan," and always made us imagine other lives, other choices, other varieties of human folly, grandeur and capacity for evil."

- Norman Mailer

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"We would talk about everything … He knew he wasn't going to live very much longer, but he would still talk of taking on the greatest subjects. He always was working on something."

- Norman Mailer

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"He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original."

- Norman Mailer

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"men write about their life all the time. You know, Norman Mailer would put himself in his books, and no one made it seem that he was doing something less."

- Norman Mailer

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"I was inventing it as I went along. And I didn't know where I was going to end up, and I did not have a large shape in mind. I felt that I was making the path as I was going along. I like Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer writing the novel as history, history as novel. I teach Armies of the Night; I use it to show students how we make history in the same way we write a novel. And as we narrate what's going on, we shape history. I also like that book a lot because he writes about the responsibility of the writer. Does the writer actually go out in the street and perform politics and"

- Norman Mailer

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"In the beginning, Mailer spins publicity for convict and murderer Jack Abbott, helps get Abbott's prison book published and Abbott paroled. The con with the prose style of a Doberman (all speed and teeth) obeys his muse again. Six weeks after parole, Abbott kills a man in New York City's East Village. … It was common to hear New Yorkers say that he should be tried as an accessory to murder. Mailer barged around giving interviews and suing a newspaper for libel, looking truculent and stricken. In one way it was unfair: Mailer had had the courage to sponsor a talented pariah, and then something in Abbott's transition from prison went disastrously wrong. Mailer was personally aggrieved and pained, not only for Abbott but for Abbott's victim. It is true that certain writers adopt convicts: criminals, sinister, romantic and stupid as sharks, become the executive arms of intellectuals' violent fantasies. For some reason, intellectuals rarely understand that they are being conned: convicts are geniuses of ingratiation. Still, Mailer after all was not promoting a killer but a prose stylist and what he judged to be a salvageable human being. He miscalculated: he overrated the writer in Abbott and underestimated the murderer."

- Norman Mailer

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"In high school, I'd devoured the works of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, moved by stories of men trying to find their place in an America that didn't welcome them. Later, studying the early civil rights movement in college, I'd been intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber on Dr. King's sermons and writings."

- Norman Mailer

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"He could do anything he wanted to do — the movie business, writing, theater, politics. He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."

- Norman Mailer

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"The crazy uncle of American literature … endearing and obnoxious, graceful and loutish, shrewd and clueless … his own biggest fan and his own worst enemy."

- Norman Mailer

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"One night, we had a dinner party for the express purpose of introducing Mailer to Neil Gaiman. Neil, as was his habit, was so charming that Norman wanted to read The Sandman. He liked the series enough to provide a cover blurb for the next trade paperback collection. Neil later reported that bookstore buyers told him that the Mailer quote persuaded them to stock graphic novels. And the rest, as they say, is history."

- Norman Mailer

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"Mailer is no Balzac of the twentieth century. And he is engrossed in his own grim effort of self-validation...Mailer's adversary disposition recalls D. H. Lawrence, his predecessor in the line of literary minds dedicated to the renovation of society by means of a revolution in the individual consciousness. But of the two, Lawrence is actually closer to our present literary spirit, for he is not only the more subjective writer but also the more abstract."

- Norman Mailer

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"He was interesting, because he was interested. … I went to Provincetown a year or two ago and stayed with him and Norris. It was very pleasant. He was in good form. We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about."

- Norman Mailer

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"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

- Norman Mailer

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"An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation."

- Billy Wilder

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"A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot."

- Billy Wilder

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"Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts."

- Billy Wilder

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"I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut."

- Billy Wilder

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"I just made pictures I would've liked to see."

- Billy Wilder

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"Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles isn't a realist."

- Billy Wilder

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"That piece of Hollywood shit with Billy Wilder [Buddy Buddy] is over, thank God. No outsider can imagine the stupidity, blustering hysteria, authoritarianism, and paralyzing boredom of shooting a flick for Billy Wilder. The so-called "actors" are simply trained poodles who sit up on their hind legs and jump through hoops. I thought the insanity would never stop. But I got a shitload of money."

- Billy Wilder

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"The old-timers thought, Well, fire's bad; we'll get rid of it. That was certainly a mistake. We have to get it back into the system somehow, in safe, controlled ways. That's what I'm into now."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"Create turf, save water. Those are the two main principles. And, you know, keep everything alive. Maintain a game habitat. That's important so that you have an entire system at work. Cattle are going to do better, oddly enough, if the birds are doing good and the deer are doing good. You try to manage the whole thing."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"I'm one of those people who feels that agriculture is a creative act. It's a very fine art — that's the way I approach it."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"It makes me feel like a very special person, that I'm able to make my living with my imagination. I developed a big respect for my calling while I was in school, and it remains with me to this day."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"I'm really concerned about the quality of education in the United States. I think it's going down, and I don't think we spend enough money on it. It's unhealthy for our society that we remove ourselves more and more every day from books, from reading, from writing. All areas of education need more emphasis. I think we're a bit lazy here in America. I believe in the ideal of the classic liberal education, and I also think athletics are very important to the education of young people."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"I refuse to be pessimistic. I don't believe in it. I hope that we can find a way to keep from destroying the earth."

- Tommy Lee Jones

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"Out came Ms. Hilton in a Juicy track suit, chattering away like a gibbon on her jewel-encrusted cell phone. It was like magic, if magic were like a extra-strength laxative."

- April Winchell

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"Look at you, turning on me like a Pomeranian!"

- April Winchell

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"Your body is a temple, whether you're a Jew or not."

- April Winchell

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"[Referring to actress Winona Ryder] Get over it! Your "wide-eyed, gamine, trembling chipmunk" thing! Get over it!"

- April Winchell

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"[Referring to the radio station program director] I'll get him to call me some day, even if it means spilling cheese all over my brassiere at KFI, by gawd."

- April Winchell

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"I'm doin' radio and there's a bag in front of me on the console that says 'Butt Stink' on it. Somethin' ain't right."

- April Winchell

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"We've talked about coffee enemas and they're perfectly fine, except the doughnuts get stuck in the hose. And that just ruins everything."

- April Winchell

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"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."

- Arthur Miller

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"I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act."

- Arthur Miller

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"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."

- Arthur Miller

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"The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism."

- Arthur Miller

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"My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone."

- Arthur Miller

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"By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."

- Arthur Miller

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"I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge."

- Arthur Miller

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"A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."

- Arthur Miller

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"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."

- Arthur Miller

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"My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad."

- Arthur Miller

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"The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through."

- Arthur Miller

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"I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play — but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."

- Arthur Miller

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"The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility."

- Arthur Miller

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"It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. … much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness."

- Arthur Miller

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"The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less."

- Arthur Miller

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"Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author."

- Arthur Miller

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"A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great."

- Arthur Miller

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"Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day."

- Arthur Miller

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"If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment."

- Arthur Miller

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"You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you."

- Arthur Miller

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"When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. … No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion."

- Arthur Miller

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"The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes."

- Arthur Miller

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"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted."

- Arthur Miller

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"I understand his longing for immortality … Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone."

- Arthur Miller

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"He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world."

- Arthur Miller

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"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."

- Arthur Miller

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"The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality."

- Arthur Miller

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"In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks … on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film."

- Arthur Miller

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"If I see an ending, I can work backward."

- Arthur Miller

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"A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay."

- Arthur Miller

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"Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from."

- Arthur Miller

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"I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know..."

- Arthur Miller

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"The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past."

- Arthur Miller

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"I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities."

- Arthur Miller

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"If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that."

- Arthur Miller

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"Without alienation, there can be no politics."

- Arthur Miller

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"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."

- Arthur Miller

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"That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?"

- Arthur Miller

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"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

- Arthur Miller

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"I see your point, but can you name one classical Greek or Elizabethean shoemaker?"

- Arthur Miller

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"I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding."

- Arthur Miller

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"I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything."

- Arthur Miller

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"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."

- Arthur Miller

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"They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England."

- Arthur Miller

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"I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?"

- Arthur Miller

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"Why must everybody like you?"

- Arthur Miller

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"I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life."

- Arthur Miller

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"I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me."

- Arthur Miller

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"Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way."

- Arthur Miller

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"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person."

- Arthur Miller

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"A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man."

- Arthur Miller

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"Personality always wins the day."

- Arthur Miller

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"Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money."

- Arthur Miller

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"Sit down, Willy."

- Arthur Miller

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"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that."

- Arthur Miller

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"You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit."

- Arthur Miller

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"After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."

- Arthur Miller

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"Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it."

- Arthur Miller

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"Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all."

- Arthur Miller

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"Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!"

- Arthur Miller

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"You cut your life down for spite!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

- Arthur Miller

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"And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?"

- Arthur Miller

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"Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself"

- Arthur Miller

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"Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground."

- Arthur Miller

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"We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free..."

- Arthur Miller

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"In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy — or tragedy above us."

- Arthur Miller

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"I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly."

- Arthur Miller

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"Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category. But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear of insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us — from this total examination of the "unchangeable" environment — comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy. More important, from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn."

- Arthur Miller

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"The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies."

- Arthur Miller

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"Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect. No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination."

- Arthur Miller

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"There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal. For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity."

- Arthur Miller

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"The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force. Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief — optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man. It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time — the heart and spirit of the average man."

- Arthur Miller

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"Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time. But I'll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again."

- Arthur Miller

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"A child's spirit is like a child, you cannot catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back."

- Arthur Miller

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"We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone."

- Arthur Miller

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"There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!"

- Arthur Miller

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"I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more."

- Arthur Miller

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"Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face! Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir? Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free."

- Arthur Miller

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"Proctor: You will not judge me more, Elizabeth. I have good reason to think before I charge fraud on Abigail, and I will think on it. Let you look to your own improvement before you go to judge your husband any more. I have forgot Abigail, and — Elizabeth: And I. Proctor: Spare me! You forget nothin' and forgive nothin.' Learn charity, woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven months since she is gone. I have not moved from there to here without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart. I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for lies, as though I come into a court when I come into this house! Elizabeth: I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man, John — only somewhat bewildered. Proctor: Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer!"

- Arthur Miller

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"I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!"

- Arthur Miller

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"I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it."

- Arthur Miller

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"Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small."

- Arthur Miller

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"Though our own hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respect and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court — the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow."

- Arthur Miller

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"We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment."

- Arthur Miller

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"A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time — we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world."

- Arthur Miller

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"Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country — Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here? Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless. Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country! Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it. Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!"

- Arthur Miller

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"In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not? Therefore, who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims — and they do testify, the children certainly do testify. As for the witches, none will deny that we are most eager for all their confessions. Therefore, what is left for a lawyer to bring out? I think I have made my point. Have I not?"

- Arthur Miller

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"A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!"

- Arthur Miller

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"You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!"

- Arthur Miller

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"It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride."

- Arthur Miller

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"John, I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me! Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I kept!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let — Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"

- Arthur Miller

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"I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!"

- Arthur Miller

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"He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!"

- Arthur Miller

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"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?"

- Arthur Miller

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"I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it."

- Arthur Miller

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"I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?"

- Arthur Miller

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"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you're climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms."

- Arthur Miller

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"I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match."

- Arthur Miller

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"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."

- Arthur Miller

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"Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house — in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up."

- Arthur Miller

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"I remember reading “Death of a Salesman” in high school and hating it, but when I read it in college I loved it. I was blown away by what Arthur Miller had created."

- Arthur Miller

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"His work teaches us a lot about how to fight evil."

- Arthur Miller

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"Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century — O'Neill, Williams, Miller. … Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond."

- Arthur Miller

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"The greatest playwright of the 20th century."

- Arthur Miller

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"I have come across several articles by the American playwright Arthur Miller in which he sets out to denounce Stalin's purges and Brezhnev's invasion of Czechoslovakia but ends up denouncing America. Living in America, Arthur Miller wrote all the plays he wanted to write, had them produced, and was amply rewarded by money and fame. He also managed to have everything his heart desired, including the most fabulous blonde of his day. Why then this loathing for America? The only explanation I can think of is that Miller is too self-righteous and self-important to admit the gross stupidity of his Stalinist commitment. He must go on trying to convince the world that there is not much to choose between Russia and America."

- Arthur Miller

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"Arthur Miller has always been the owner of a sound, but essentially minor, talent and no amount of purgation can improve the quality of whatever there may be to follow. As it is, however, those qualities which he has, substantial as they are, always seem to overreach themselves, straining after a magnitude for which they are simply not fitted. And in the few years that he has been away, on Sinai it would seem, Miller has developed an absurd literary hubris, puffing himself up like an idiotic bull-frog in Aesop."

- Arthur Miller

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"The comparison with Reginald Rose is more than a passing snub, for it actually makes reference to an enduring affinity between Miller and the sturdy, footling craftsmen of "liberal" telly. Stripped of its tricks, and with the soliloquies cut, and so on, After the Fall shrinks to its proper proportion, as a sequence of sketches for The Defenders and The Eleventh Hour."

- Arthur Miller

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"In Arthur Miller's writing, which counts on an effect of flatness that is to be found in most of our well-made fiction in this period, the question is used for a kind of sonority, a reverberation of consciousness that actually demands more consciousness and more language. After the inarticulateness of most of his people, we feel relief when a man breaks through and cries to another man: Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you?...What must I do to you?"

- Arthur Miller

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"Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimisation."

- Arthur Miller

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"I was in Switzerland one time. Beautiful country! Great country. And interesting: 500 years without a war! Very impressive. Also very lucky for the Swiss Army! I don't know if you've ever seen that little Swiss Army knife? It's not much of a weapon! [...] If somebody attacks you, what do you pull out? Your nail clippers? "C'mon, buddy! Let's go!" "You get past me, the guy in back of me's got a spoon!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"My favorite sign: you pull up to the light, and it says "Left Turn Okay". Don't you like that one? A little personal touch! It's like they're sayin' to you "Left Turn? Okay..." "We're not crazy about you makin' the left. It's okay..." Pretty much: "Make it. Get it over with." [...] They should get more involved, with signs like "Right Turn? Why Not?" "U Turn? Enjoy It!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Have you ever seen the guy who's got the record for "Fattest Man in the World"? It's an amazing thing: Bob Hughes, 1,400 pounds. Ladies and gentlemen, the man has let himself go! I used to even feel bad, y'know, talkin' about him onstage, 'cause, y'know, somebody-- you could be-- but you could weigh 1,000 pounds and go "He's not talkin' about me." "This is a man with a serious weight problem.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I had glasses when I was 10 years old. [...] Somebody puts something on your face at 10, you leave it there; you don't know the difference! I thought I was getting glasses 'cause I couldn't tell what my parents looked like. 'Cause every time I'd ask my mother to buy me something, she'd say "What do I look like? A bank?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When you're 10, your parents are the bank! You know what I mean? If I'm 10 and I need money, [can] I walk into Chase Bank and get money? The teller's just gonna say to me "What do I look like? Your mother?" "Hit the road, four-eyes!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I also had braces. [...] Glasses at 10, braces at 12: I was thrilled to have these things on my face. I mean, y'know, [I'm] thinkin' about talkin' to a girl for the very first time in my life, I want a lot of corrective apparatus on my head. [pause for laughter] This is what women like! I said to my parents "Let's not stop now! Let's get me a hearing aid! Orthopedic shoes!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I want my comedy to be the things nobody else talks about. Not necessarily things people don't want to talk about, but just things that everybody else missed."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I have a lot of respect for [stand-up] as a craft. I don't see it as just a stepping-stone. I mean, it's a hard life in some ways. But I have a fascination for it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Stand-up is] kind of like catching bullets between your teeth. If you're gonna do it right, it would be something to learn it and then not make a career out of it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I like jokes and laughing more than anything. Everybody has an appetite for a different thing. And comedy is something that I have an endless appetite for."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's the greatest thing about comedy. If you've got talent, it's unmistakable. No one misses it and you don't have to wait around for a break."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up is what I am."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That is the feeling of life: you've got to go, all the time. You get to your job, what is your first thought? "I want to get home." But you get home, you feel cooped up; you've got to get out. You're out, it's late; you've got to get back. Wherever you are, you've got to get the hell out of there!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The fact is: almost everything is funny. You just have to have a way of looking at it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I really feel that that's one of the big powers of adulthood, is the ability to be totally bored and remain standing. I think that's why they can set up the DMV that way."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's [my dad's] other big advice to me: "easy". I don't know what the hell that means. Every time we lift up something heavy, he goes "Easy now! Take it easy! Easy! Easy!" It's not easy; it's very difficult. Okay? You want easy? Leave it here in the hallway. That's easy."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Dads feel they know enough about the world to start their own civilization. That's what the family is to them. The fathers think "The hell with life! I can invent my own people. My own rules for fashion. My own health and diet.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Dogs are broke their entire lives. And you know why they have no money? No pockets! They have no pockets. They see change on the street, there is nothing they can do about it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Being engaged is-- you know what it's like to me? It's like being on the first part of the rollercoaster, where you're just goin' up: (makes ticking noises) "Boy, this looks pretty scary!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Now they show you how detergents get out bloodstains on television: pretty violent image, there! I think if you've got a T-shirt with bloodstains all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem right now. Maybe you ought to get rid of the body before you do the wash."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"To me, clothes spend most of their lives waiting, if you look at it. In the closet, in the hamper, in the drawer. The shirts in your house right now are going "He never picks me...". Laundry day is their only exciting day, 'cause the washing machine is the nightclub of clothes. It's dark, bubbles happening; they're all kind of dancing around in there. A shirt grabs the underwear: "C'mon, babe, let's go!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The dumbest thing of all, I think, you can think in a New York cab is "Well, the man knows what he's doing!" "I mean, he is driving a little fast, but he's a professional cab driver. He's got a cab driver's license; I can see it right there." I don't even know what it takes to get a cab driver's license. I think all you need is a face... and a name with, like, eight consonants in a row."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I always, y'know, idolized people like Bill Cosby and people that were just themselves. I mean, I think the idea of a comedian as someone that you relate to-- I think "comedy star" is almost an oxymoron. You don't look up to comedians like you look at Madonna or, y'know, Elvis, or people like that."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was petrified when [my parents] first saw me [perform]. Well, also: because I wasn't really funny as a kid, and I felt like I was, y'know, exposing this alter-ego. Y'know? Plus, here I am getting up on stage and manipulating these people, y'know, into laughing. It's a power thing! Y'know? And it's weird to do it in front of your parents."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A comedian is basically a very aggressive thing to do. You force people to see things your way so powerfully, they react audibly! They actually-- you force them to react. It's "Look at things the way I look at them, and laugh at it when I say to!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I thought "This is the pinnacle of life, to me: if [I] could do this-- y'know, if [I] could stand up on stage and make people laugh, that would be the ultimate accomplishment of my personality!" And I just thought "Laughs! To be working with laughs and jokes all the time: what a fun life that would be!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I get an idea, and I think "There's something funny about that." And I don't know what it is, at first; this is how my stuff usually works. Like, I saw-- like, McDonald's having a sign that says "60 Billion [Sold]". And I think "Now, that's-- y'know, there's something very funny about that: that a company of that size is still counting every burger. Y'know? I mean, there's some kind of insecurity there, that you're still thinking "How well-- Are we doing well?" "We're doing well. Aren't we doing well? Look at how many we've sold!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The word "pet peeve" is one of my biggest pet peeves, to tell you the truth."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We all love Michael J. Fox. I'm a big fan of Michael J. Fox. I'm a big fan of Spin City. He plays the mayor, or something. I, on the other hand, play myself! And I guess last year, you people didn't quite buy me as me!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Why is commitment the kryptonite of men, super and otherwise? [...] The trouble is that, deep down, most of us men believe we have a great deal in common with superheroes. This is the secret truth of all male thinking. I'm not even supposed to be telling you this. When men are growing up and reading about Batman, Spiderman and Superman, these are not fantasies, these are options."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Men will always say they love women as a group, but somehow seem to be less fond of them as individuals. Women, on the other hand, often appreciate the man they're with but almost never have anything nice to say about our sex as a group. [...] Women are afraid of men they don't know. Men are afraid of women they know very well."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm a single guy. I date. I think I enjoy it. For me, nothing caps off a week like four hours of solid tension."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not the color, but to accept God's final decision on where your lips end."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There is absolutely nothing you can do on a date to help you feel better about the tremendously uncomfortable situation you're in. And the reason it's uncomfortable is that no one's on the date for the date. They're on the date to see what's going to happen at the end of the date."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's nothing like a kiss to get something started between a man and a woman. When the lips meet, this is the official ignition. The instrument panel lights up. The finger moves across, flipping all the toggle switches up. The engines hum. Something is underway."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I would say the main competition for the book is the video because for some reason people feel they need to come home with a rectangular block of something that they don't know the end of. The big advantage of a book is it's very easy to rewind. Close it and you're right back at the beginning."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Seems to me the basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To us, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Some people actually cheat on the people that they're cheating with, which is like holding up a bank and then turning to the robber next to you and going, "All right, give me everything you got, too.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Remember when you were in school and they'd do those hearing tests? [...] I wanted to do unbelievable on the hearing test. I wanted them to come over to me and go, "We think you may have something close to super-hearing. What you heard was a cotton ball touching a piece of felt. We're sending the results to Washington, we'd like you to meet the President.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Nobody's really getting in shape for anything. In modern society, you really don't have to be physically strong to do anything. The only reason that you're getting in shape is so you can get through the workout. So we're working out, so that we'll be in shape, for when we have to do our exercises. That's comedy."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The other day I was watching women in a department store looking at clothes, and I noticed women don't try on the clothes, they get behind the clothes. They take a dress off the rack and hold it up against themselves. [...] They stick one leg way out and kind of lean back. I guess they need to know, "If someday I'm one-legged at a forty-five-degree angle, what am I going to wear?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"To men, cleavage is like the nearest thing to a UFO landing nearby, that's what it is. To women, buying a pair of shoes that they really love is like boarding the alien ship. I think it's entirely possible that aliens have landed and they haven't been able to get our attention because we're so preoccupied with cleavage and shoes."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It's very important for human beings to feel they are popular and well-liked among a large group of people that they have no interest in."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"What is the handicap parking situation at the Special Olympics? They must have to just stack like a hundred cars into those two spots."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm on the plane, we left late, and the pilot says, "We're going to be making up some time in the air." I thought, "Isn't that interesting. They just make up time." That's why you have to reset your watch when you land. Of course, when they say they're making up time, obviously they're increasing the speed of the aircraft. Now my question is, if you can go faster, why don't you just go as fast as you can all the time? "Come on, there're no cops up here! Nail it! Give it some gas!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Flying doesn't make me nervous. Driving to the airport can make me nervous. Because if you miss that plane, there's no alternative. [...] No airline goes, "Well, you missed the flight. We do have a cannon leaving in about ten minutes. Would you be interested in that? It's not a direct cannon, you have to change cannons after you land.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Frankly, I don't think people think of their office as a workplace anyway. I think they think of it as a stationery store with Danish. You want to get your pastry, your envelopes, your supplies, your toilet paper, six cups of coffee, and you go home."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Whenever a friend refers a doctor they say, "Make sure you tell him that you know me." Why? What's the difference? He's a doctor. "Oh, you know Bob? Oh, okay. I'll give you the real medicine. Everybody else I'm giving Tic Tacs.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The hardest part of being a clown, it seems to me, would be that you are constantly referred to as a clown. [...] How do you even know that you want to be a clown? I guess you just get to a point where your pants look so bad it's actually easier to become a clown than to have the proper alterations done."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When you want to enjoy something, you must never let logic get too much in the way."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Don't you hate "To Be Continued"s on TV? [...] I mean the whole reason you watch a TV show is because it ends. If I wanted a long, boring story with no point to it, I've got my life."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Maybe comets killed the dinosaurs, maybe they tripped and fell. What's the difference? We'll never know. We couldn't solve the Kennedy Assassination, we had films of that. Good luck with the Stegosaurus."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's what annoys me about sweepstakes companies, they always tease you with that, "You may have already won," and we all buy into it. [...] I'd like once for a sweepstakes company to have some guts, come out with the truth, just be honest with people one time. Send out envelopes, "You have definitely lost." You turn it over, giant printing, "Not even close!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It's not enough that we catch [lobsters], kill them, and eat them. We want to see them in the tank as we walk into the restaurant, sweating it out. [...] I saw one once that looked like he was attempting to clean the inside of the tank. "I just work here.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If we really stuck with the classic Greek priorities, a sound mind in a sound body, the only two places we'd ever go is to a library or a gym."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Neat and clean. That's the way I want to live. My idea of the perfect living room would be the bridge on the Starship Enterprise: big chair, nice TV, remote control. That's why Star Trek really was the ultimate male fantasy. Hurtling through space in your living room, watching TV."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Monkeys have contributed a lot to society in their way. They were the first astronauts in the Sixties. Which I'm sure made perfect sense in the monkey brain. "I see, so instead of the little bellhop uniform, you want me to get into a rocket and orbit the earth at supersonic speed. Yeah, I think that is the next logical step for me.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I was a kid, my favorite ride was the bumper cars. What a wonderful fantasy of the driving experience as it could be. All confrontation, no destination. [...] Driving as an act of pure hostility."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'll tell you, you get into a hot tub with three or four really old men, this is not the cover of the Club Med brochure. They get out of the tub, it looks like an ad for gravity."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Death is] the last big move of your life. The hearse is like the van, the pallbearers are your close friends, the only ones you could really ask to help you with a big move like that. And the casket is that great, perfect box you've been looking for your whole life. The only problem is once you find it, you're in it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Do the people that work in these little shops in the airport have any idea what the prices are every place else in the world? "Yeah, $14, tuna sandwich. We think that's fair.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You know how the old people drive? They drive slow, they sit low. That is their motto. The state flag of Florida should be just a steering wheel with a hat and two [sets of] knuckles on it. And then that left turn signal on from when they left the house that morning. That's a legal turn in Florida: it's known as an eventual left."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When you're little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up. "Wait up! Hold up! Shut up!" "Mom, I'll clean up! Let me stay up!" For parents, of course, it's just the opposite: everything is down. "Just calm down!" "Slow down!" "Come down here!" "Sit down!" "Put that down!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The whole supermarket itself is designed to break down your sense of having any life outside the supermarket. It's like a casino: there's no clocks, no windows, no easily-accessible exits. You ever not buy anything in the supermarket and try to get out of there? It's impossible. There's no way out."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm very impressed with this seedless watermelon product that they have for us. They've done it! We now have seedless watermelon. Pretty amazing! What are they planting to grow the seedless watermelon, I wonder? The melons aren't humpin', are they? They must be plantin' somethin'!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Nobody wants anything less than "extra strength". "Extra strength" is the absolute minimum. You can't even get "strength"; "strength" is out now. It's all "extra strength". Some people are not satisfied with "extra"; they want "maximum". "Give me the 'maximum strength'." "Give me the maximum allowable human dosage." "Figure out what will kill me and then back it off a little bit.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was best man at a wedding one time; that was pretty good. Pretty good title, I thought: "best man". I thought it was a bit much! I thought we'd have the groom and a pretty good man. That's more than enough. If I'm the best man, why is she marrying him?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Men and women will never understand each other; we all know that. It's just not gonna happen; just forget it. I know I will not understand women. I know I will never be able to understand how a woman could take boiling hot wax, pour it on her upper thighs, rip the hair out by the root... and still be afraid of a spider."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Men, as an organization, are getting more women than any other group working anywhere in the world today! Wherever women are, we have men looking into the situation right now. We explored the Earth looking for women... even went to the Moon just to see if there [were] any women there. That's why we brought that little car. Why would you bring a car, unless there's some chance of going on a date?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Dating is not easy. What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night? The only difference between a date and a job interview is: not many job interviews is there a chance you'll end up naked at the end of it. "Well, Bill, the boss thinks you're the man for the position! Why don't you strip down, meet some of the people you'll be workin' with?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"To a man, sex is like a car accident, anyway, and determining a female orgasm is like being asked "What did you see after the car went out of control?" "Well, I remember I heard a lot of screeching noises, I was facing the wrong way at one point, and in the end, my body was thrown clear!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think, if I was an Olympic athlete, I would rather come in last than win the silver... if you think about it. Y'know, you win the gold, you feel good; you win the bronze, you think "Well, at least I got something." But you win that silver, that's like: "Congratulations! You... almost won." "Of all the losers, you came in first... of that group." "You're the number one... loser." "No one lost... ahead of you.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The luge is the only sport I've ever seen that you could have people competing in it against their will, and it would be exactly the same. Y'know, if they were just grabbin' people off the street: "Hey! Hey, hey! What is this? I don't want to be in the luge!" Y'know, you put the helmet on 'em, you wouldn't really hear 'em screaming; just: (whoosh) "You're in the luge, buddy!" (panicked screams) World record. Didn't even want to do it! I want to see that event next year: the involuntary luge."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I saw a thing, actually-- a study that said: speaking in front of a crowd is considered the #1 fear of the average person. I found that amazing! #2 was death. Death is #2? This means, to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There are many things we can point to as proof that the human being is not smart. The helmet is my personal favorite: the fact that we had to invent the helmet. Now, why did we invent the helmet? Well, because we were participating in many activities that were crackin' our heads. We looked at the situation. We chose not to avoid these activities, but to just make little plastic hats so that we can continue our head-crackin' lifestyles. The only thing dumber than the helmet is the helmet law, the point of which is to protect a brain that is functioning so poorly, it's not even tryin' to stop the cracking of the head that it's in!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think we should all wear the same exact clothes... because it seems to be what happens eventually, anyway. Any time you see a movie or a TV show where there's people from the future -- or another planet -- they're all wearin' the same outfit. I think the decision just gets made: "Alright, everyone, from now on, it's just gonna be the one-piece silver suit with the V-stripe and the boots. That's the outfit.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It is amazing what people will believe. I mean, I've watched these infomercials late at night: if it gets late enough, the products start to look good to me. I have actually found myself sitting there thinking "Y'know... I don't think I have a knife that can cut through a shoe..." "I don't think any of my knives are good enough to cut through shoes!" "I'm gonna get this knife and cut my shoes up.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"So feeble, the things we come up with to foil crooks: like the "wanted" posters at the post office? You're there, you got your package; you're tryin' to mail somethin'. This guy's wanted in twelve states. "Yeah? Now what? Okay?" Y'know, I check the guy standing in line behind me. If it's not him, that's pretty much all I can do. Why don't they just hold on to this guy when they're taking his picture?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I watch Sesame Street a lot [these days] because I have two little kids. And a lot of people ask me, y'know, would I ever consider doing another show, and... I sit there, and I watch this "Elmo" guy; and he is so likeable, and so funny, and so charming. And I sit there with my daughter, and I think "Let him bust his little red ass every week!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The equivalent for a normal person would be to go in to work in your underwear... and try and do your job that you normally do. All of a sudden, you can't do anything. That's how a comedian feels when he's doing a new bit."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When you're crafting an act, you need to see how that material works in front of each different type of situation."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Twenty minutes is not comedy. An hour, an hour and fifteen minutes: that's comedy, y'know? You learn how to open, how to sustain, how to pace."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"What is this urge to get information we already have? Whenever I'm in a car, and I drive by a mirrored office building, I look in the reflection to see if I'm in the car. This is information I already have! What am I looking for? Why am I checking? And what would I do if I looked and I saw that there was a small Korean woman driving my car?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I always say your number of years in comedy is about your maturity level. When you're doing it ten years, you're like a 10-year-old. Fifteen, you're like a 15-year-old; you're start-- a slight bit of maturity. Twenty years, you're like-- kind of a grown-up, but still completely infantile."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I have this image in my mind of what a comedian's supposed to be... that I'm always trying to live up to, and that I always fall short of. [...] I'm the show for the night. I have to make that evening work for those people."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I was starting out, I used to sit down and write a couple times a week. And then, one day, I was watching these construction workers go back to work; I was watchin' 'em kind of trudgin' down the street... and I was just-- It was like a revelation to me, and I realized "These guys don't want to go back to work after lunch, but they're goin... 'cause that's their job!" And I [thought] "If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job, I should be able to do the same." "Just trudge your ass in!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Any new technology: it just gets translated into a sexual form. Home video? "Sex video!" Phone? "Phone sex!" Internet? "Porno website!" Copy machine? "Put your ass on it!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm supposed to get the colonoscopy test. When you get into your forties, I think-- I have heard -- from the healthcare professionals -- that you-- it's very important to get the camera up your ass. I have resisted this... because I feel the press has invaded my life enough. [pause for laughter] I feel that I will draw the line here, and say "no" to the pooparazzi."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The question is this: "What have I been doing?" Everybody says to me "Hey, you don't do the show anymore! What do you do?" I'll tell you what I do. Nothin'! [pause for applause] Yeah, I know what you're thinkin': "That sounds pretty good!" You're thinkin' "I might like to do nothing myself!" Well, let me tell you: doing nothing is not as easy as it looks. You have to be careful... because the idea of doin' anything, which could easily lead to doin' somethin'... that would cut into your nothin'... and that would force [you] to have to drop everything."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I used to sit in my room at... let's see: how old-- I was ten years old... playing [Bill Cosby's] albums and just crying laughing, and just in wonderment at what he was doing, and just-- that I had never heard somebody be so funny before."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I've already done something, and [Bill] reminded me of that. And now, this-- I really just want to do what I love to do... and I want to go where he's gone. Y'know? I want to be able to explore this [comedy] thing and maybe find some-- That's what I keep thinking: that maybe there's something else out there! I just feel like I can go somewhere with it. I don't know where."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Seinfeld] was gonna be a 90-minute special that was gonna fill in for Saturday Night Live one weekend-- one Saturday night when they were off. [...] And I just didn't think that you could sustain that for 90 minutes. I thought maybe you could do it for 30 minutes. And that's how it became a TV series. It was gonna be a special all the way, but I just didn't think we could last 90 minutes. So, instead, we ended up makin' 90 hours."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Larry and I] had a lot of fun writing then. We always had fun writing; it was never a struggle. I don't remember us ever really racking our brains too much in writing. We had a great chemistry."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't remember when I saw the testing results, but it's really one of everyone's favorite things about [Seinfeld], is how poorly it was received by the network people. [...] My favorite thing in the testing is that the show was considered "contemporary, unusual, humorous, and appealing to young adults: therefore, not something that we would want". (laughs)"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Once we got [Julia], I was absolutely convinced, from then on, that nothing could really hurt the show. That it really-- It just felt like a balanced team."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You almost kind of knew you were on the right track, when people at the network didn't like it. I mean, I wanted them to like it, but we weren't going to, y'know, really change the tone of the show. I couldn't have done a show any other-- I couldn't have done any other show than that show; I just wouldn't have-- wouldn't know how to do it!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"NBC -- when we suggested that we wanted to do this one-set idea where the gang just waits for a table the entire show and never gets it -- they thought that was very static and not appealing. And they didn't like-- want us to write it, they didn't want us to film it; and after we filmed it, they held it back and didn't run it until towards the end of the season, 'cause they were so sure that this was going to really be one of the real bombs of the season."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The idea that you have two guys who've never written a show being run by a network executive that had never had a show, leading to a show that has a unique and unusual feel: this is a model that all the networks subsequently ignored -- and never did again -- except for HBO! I think HBO-- I don't know if they really knew that that's how our show evolved, but that's a network that hires people that they like and says... that's the end of their job! "We like you; do what you think you should do." And it leads to much more distinctive programming!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The journey of someone coming in the room with an idea for something, and then saying "Yeah, that sounds good; let's do that", and then, the-- it going into an outline form, and then a script form, and then a read-through, and then a rewrite, and then a rehearsal, and then more rewrite, more rehearsal, then a shoot night, and then an editing process, and then finally going on the air, is essentially an off-road egg race where you carry the egg in a spoon."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[The writers] knew they were talking to odd guys, y'know? Larry and I were odd guys. So they wouldn't come in-- They-- Y'know, I mean, they would come in and pitch, and obviously, some things would hit, and some things would miss, but they never thought "This is too crazy for these guys." Nobody would think that... 'cause clearly, we were capable of just about anything!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There was a tone we set with the writing staff -- that Larry set -- that it had to be original; it had to be unique. It-- it had to be something very funny and very fresh."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I remember somebody coming in and pitching me an idea one time, and I'm saying "No. No, I don't think so." And-- and the writer said to me "But we've done this so many times before!" And I went "That is not a point in its favor!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Larry and I just had that great cross filter: if both of us kind of related to [an idea] in some way, it seemed to work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Larry and I] were all about writing. We didn't really want to hear from anybody, talk to anybody. It was just writing and-- and rehearsing. The casting was quick; editing was quick. Everything else we did very quickly, but we labored over the writing."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That takes a lot of work: to set up six different scenes that are not on stage, plus do a stage show in front of an audience. It's a production issue that the average fan wasn't aware of, but I think they appreciated-- It gave the show a vitality and an expansiveness."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was in every room: from the writing room to the stage, to the editing room, to the rewrite, and I knew what the original intent always was."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I used to say that each season was a transatlantic submarine voyage: that you would load up the sub with all the supplies -- y'know, you-- we would do pre-production: we would come up with outlines and story ideas, and get as much stuff as we could in advance -- but once that-- we shoved off and we were out into the ocean, you just-- you quickly went through your supplies about a third of the way, and then, you would just start at eating each other to get through the season."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It was always heartbreaking. You could get [an idea] all the way to the edit... and it-- and it falls apart. You got it all that way and right before it's in the-- just as it goes in the show, you go "That's not the right angle... and it's not funny at all now." And even though you had it all that way, and then, just at the last moment, you just "Oh! You dropped the egg!" Splat."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"This was really one of Larry's most brilliant ideas for the show, was these arcs; and this was one of the best ones, was George and Jerry tryin' to get this pilot on NBC."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"My friend Larry Miller used to come by the set all the time. And I said to him "Y'know, for the life of me, I can't figure out why this show isn't really popular." He [said] "Oh, don't worry! It will be." Y'know? And I said "Come on! We've been here four years!" [...] And he kept sayin' to me "It's gonna catch on!" [I was] thinking "'Catch on'?" Y'know? You don't suddenly catch on, y'know, after you've been on TV for four years! And-- but sure enough, he was right!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We weren't really trying to gain more attention or-- We certainly weren't trying to be provocative in any way. We were just -- as any TV show is -- constantly struggling to come up with new ideas. And when you're struggling, bad ideas start to sound like good ideas. And crazy ideas start to sound like sane ideas! And that's what happened in Season 4, is a lot of crazy ideas started to make sense."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[George is] like the kind of guy that you hang around with in New York who's not in the [stand-up] business, but he's been your friend for a long time and you're just kind of-- In the important ways, you're too similar to ever not be friends. [...] Even though your lives are in completely different places, the friendship survives, 'cause in the important ways of shallowness and neurotic exploration of meaningless detail: that's where you bonded."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Whenever an idea would come out that was too crazy for me, it would always fit George perfectly. George was really a catch-all for a lot of ideas. He was a guy who you could "buy" doing any number of extreme problem-solving techniques."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"George never felt guilty that he was trying to cheat someone, because he had already been cheated, as far as he was concerned! He was just getting a small amount back from the casino that had already totally emptied out his bank account!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't think there's another TV series that you could name where the list of absolutely outstanding characters is so long. You-- you can't even begin to just say "Well, it was a show about four people"; it wasn't. I mean, they would've-- [Seinfeld] wouldn't have lasted so long -- at the level that it was at -- if it was just the four of us every week."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The beautiful thing that Michael discovered-- and I don't know at what point it was; maybe it was the second year [of Seinfeld]: he was playing Kramer a little slower than the other three characters, a little dumber. And then, he got the idea that he should play it that everyone else is dumber than him. And that was the key to it. Once he got that: then, the character just took off!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Larry had a great word for [Julia]: he said that she gives [Seinfeld] "luster". [...] And she did; she was like the pearl that smoothed over all this kind of rough, kind of low-minded behavior of the other three characters."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That last [season], I really felt like-- was really a gift to the audience, 'cause I was really done after the eighth. But I decided to take a deep breath and try and do one last season, because the audience support that we enjoyed was just phenomenal."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The trouble with [writing a screenplay] is: you have this story, which is such a nuisance! Y'know, in stand-up, you just tell the funny part. But in a movie, the audience demands that you tell them some sort of story that makes sense. And this was a tremendous handicap for me [on Bee Movie], because [the story] frankly doesn't interest me that much."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I always felt like I was very much a "hook"-less comedian, and that I would always be hook-less. And that-- I thought "Maybe that's my hook!" Y'know? That I just don't have anything that you latch onto as "He's the guy who does this" or "looks like this"."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up is the only thing that I knew -- that I could be sure -- that I-- if I was doing it, and audiences were responding well, that I wasn't cheating. 'Cause there is no way to cheat, in stand-up! It's the naked-est, purest thing in the world."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A stand-up act is like a tennis game: I mean, even if you're good, you gotta keep playing if you want to keep that game at a certain point."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's always this thing with "Well, he's no Richard Pryor!" Y'know? And I always, y'know, would apologize for not being raised by prostitutes in a whorehouse. It was just-- there was just very little I could do about it! And I try to overcome it as best I can."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You start to know, on stage, when to get off. There's just this feeling that you develop from years and years of doing it; you just feel that "We're getting-- Everyone's really having a good time... and I think, in another few minutes, this is going to start to get old... 'Good night, everybody!'" And everyone's happy! [...] It's just... proportions. Y'know? I guess it's a function of art and economy: that economy is essential to all good art. And I thought "Let's-- " Even though we had done a lot [of Seinfeld]: nine years, 180 episodes, I thought "We can't do one too many, or it's gonna taint the whole thing.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When the Beatles ended, it was so sudden, and it made what they did somehow more valuable. 'Cause it-- just suddenly, it was over, and that's it. That's the complete set. Y'know? Nine years, twelve albums, whatever it is: that's it. So, I kind of took from that "I want to try and do that"."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap. When you stub your toe on the foot of the bed, that was a gap in knowledge. And the pain is a lot of information really quick. That's what pain is."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Do you think if they only made one Hangover -- and didn't make the other two -- it would be considered a comedy classic? Do you think that you destroyed what would have been a comedy classic, by the cash grab of II and III?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"All dads dress in the style of the last good year of their lives."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I go to see somebody work, I don't want to see your "new hour". I want to see the act!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"No one is more judged in civilized society than the stand-up comedian. Every twelve seconds, you're rated."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"All I had to do was do [stand-up] once, and I didn't-- Really, success wasn't my objective; it was just "I wanna be one of those guys!" If I can be one of those guys, I'm-- I win everything!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Really good bits go deep into your head and keep comin' back."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"My first bit that I thought "That's a real bit!" was about the tramway between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. 1976: the city was going bankrupt. I go "Oh! That's great! They're putting up rides for us! Next thing, I guess they'll be putting up a rollercoaster through the ghetto!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"One of the things that bothered me about acting is that a lot of people just say they can do it and-- and can't! There's nobody in this world [of comedy] that says they can do it and can't do it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You can't be the one who decides why you like something. It doesn't matter!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think we [comedians] deal with fear more viscerally than almost anyone! I mean, you feel the audience's fear, your own fear. The whole show is about quelling fear!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think that comedy is the be-all and end-all."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"One of the things that the comedian mindset requires is laziness."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Fear is funny. Especially when it's not fake!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"All human endeavor is killing time. All of it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Being a dad is-- y'know, it's a surfboard on a rainbow. You're gettin' all you can handle of life."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The improvements in the engineering of cars has enabled people to express their inner asshole-ness. You think "Why are people [today] so ill-behaved?" They're not! They just never had the tools to express it before."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Most things that are weird are not "weird good"."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The idea of bosses and employees is just hilarious to us [comedians]! [...] It's such a typically human attempt to organize what is un-organizable: life."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Do you think that's how life ends? That you just-- really just go "It's enough. I had enough." I know when my time comes, that how I'm gonna feel. I already feel that way!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I like that [obituaries] boil the whole guy's life down to "Invented the ballpoint-pen spring"."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The timing of the check coming at the end of the meal makes no sense. 'Cause that's when the food is the least interesting to you."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I could talk about comedy a lot, but I think it's kind of like talking about sex: you can do any fancy dive you want, [but] it's just a foot of water."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Jail is such a-- really a way that a grown-up would punish a child. "You go in there and you stay in there!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We're all tryin' to get to the same island. Whether you swim, fly, surf, or skydive in, it doesn't matter. What matters is when the red light comes on."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Our job is not for us to enjoy it. Our job is to make sure they enjoy it, and that's what we did [on Seinfeld]."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[The comedy brain] picks up so much, except a lot of basic stuff that you need."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"God has no rhyme or reason to who he gives a sense of humor to."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Have you noticed the popularity of Ultimate Fighting and The Real Housewives? These two things are two weights on the same barbell. What it is, I think, is the worst aspects of each gender exaggerated to the maximum."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I've figured out that the "non-event" is the best part of life."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The comedy universe is a swamp of madness."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't think comedy has changed, and it never will change."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedy is the closest thing to justice. If you're funny, you survive; if you're not, you don't."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It really speaks to how bad [American] food is, that it's work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If you give someone a 50, it's a big "thing" now, where they check it quite a bit. And it's like "Well, I used it! Why can't you use it?" We're all just kind of going along with this "paper has value" scam. Right?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I always feel like -- before you get a dog -- someone should take a pyramid of Alpo cans and a pyramid of dog shit, and put the dog in the middle. "Now, what we're gonna do... is you're gonna buy all of this and turn it into this. Do you still want to do this?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The truth ends every conversation."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Somebody was sayin' [somethin'] the other day about "You gotta be funny, or they'll turn on you!" [...] And I go "They should turn on you!" It's a very humbling life, at any level."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't know why people always assume that the guest is more interesting than the host."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Do you know the first thing I said as a child, before I said "Mama" or "Dada"? I said "Leave me alone!" (laughs) Is that not the mantra of stand-up comedy?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A [stand-up] bit is a bar of gold. A talk-show panel story is something that's too good to throw out but not good enough to use."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The real motivation of bein' a comedian is if you really love the sound of a laugh. And if you love that, you will never want to stop."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedians have such an intense allergy to pretension."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't think I felt "at home" on Earth, as a human, until I walked into a comedy club."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It was the back nine [episodes of a season], was the backbreaker for us, right? You [can] kind of figure out the first ten over the summer; you pull three more out of nowhere; and then the back nine is just-- you're Sandra Bullock in Gravity."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The comedian studies himself; the actor studies other people. The comedian wants to be himself; the actor wants to be anyone but themselves."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedy is more personal than food."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'll tell you the greatest thing that I've ever achieved in my career: I was on the cover of Mad magazine. And of course, I'm saying "Hello Neuman.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"To me, America used to be a place that made steel, and cars, and had giant department stores. Now, basically, we produce amateur talent and people [who] judge amateur talent."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Poetry is bad standup. It's carefully chosen words that have no laugh at the end.*"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I've probably been working on this [Pop Tart bit] for two years. [...] It's a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that's what I do; that's what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time wastefully... so that then, I can then waste their time!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I like the first line to be funny right away. "When I was a kid, and they invented the Pop Tart, the back of my head blew right off!" And that got the whole thing started: that a specific part of my head blew off; not just my head, but just the back."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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""In the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Pop Tart suddenly appeared in the supermarket! And we just stared at it like [it was] an alien spacecraft and we were like... chimps in the dirt playing with sticks." [...] What makes that joke is you get "chimps", "dirt", "playing", and "sticks". In seven words, four of them are funny!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"How did they know that there would be a need for a frosted, fruit-filled, heatable rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in, and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm looking for the connective tissue that give me the really tight, smooth link, like a jigsaw-puzzle link, and if it's too long-- if it's just a split-second too long [...] [I] will shave letters off of words, [I'll] count syllables, y'know, to get it just-- It's more like songwriting."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's the hardest part: if you have a long bit, the biggest laugh has to be at the end. It has to be!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Once this Pop Tart had come into the world, I didn't understand why we were still eating other kinds of food. 'Cause this seemed to be definitely the new way. [...] Two in the packet and two slots in the toaster. 'Why two?' One's not enough; three's too many. And they can't go stale, 'cause they were never fresh."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"In my world, the wrong-er somethin' feels, the right-er it is. So, to waste this much time on something this stupid is-- that's-- that felt good to me. [...] It's the exact opposite of what we do here at the Times, which is: we spend appropriate amounts of time on deserving subjects. So, I'm the exact opposite of that: inappropriate and undeserving subjects."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When it's your name on the goddamn show... the pressure is-- it's intense! And then, the show got successful, and everybody expected each week to be even better than the last, and it was a lot of pressure. And I loved every second of it, but it was a lot of pressure and a lot of work, and it was all great, but: never could have accomplished it without [Transcendental Meditation]."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You don't need to die for what you want to accomplish. And that's what TM is about. [...] I came up with the line that "TM is like you have a cell phone and someone gives you the charger... and you go Oh... this is-- now, I can keep using this thing and it will work all the time!'.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You know that tremendous feeling of power, when your phone is fully charged? And somebody calls, and you go "I want to hear every detail of this story! I am loaded with juice!" That's what TM is."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Working with the [Seinfeld] cast was pure heaven for me. We were as well suited to each other as it seems when you watch the show."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If you can walk to work or take your bike on a daily basis, I think that's just about the coolest thing that there is. Every morning I listen to the traffic [report] on the radio, and they talk about how they are jammed and I just laugh."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don't have to ever really grow up. And that's the best thing of all."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The pitch for [Seinfeld], the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Never try and make a comedian laugh with one of his own jokes."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The thing about [Seinfeld] is that you have to realize that I had to look into the faces of those people, six inches away, so if you think Kramer is funny on TV, imagine his real face six inches from your nose, how funny that is. You can't imagine. It's impossible not to laugh. So I would."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Very early on in my career, I hit upon this idea of being the Heckle Therapist. So that when people would say something nasty, I would immediately become very sympathetic to them and try to help them with their problem and try to work out what was upsetting them, and try to be very understanding with their anger. It opened up this whole fun avenue for me as a comedian, and no one had ever seen that before."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I still think everything has its life cycle and if you respect it, people enjoy it longer."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Larry and I] never obsess over anything that isn't mundane."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was happy with the Seinfeld finale because we didn't want to do another episode as much as we wanted to have everybody come back to the show we had so much fun with. It was a way to thank all of the people who worked on the show over the years that we thought made the show work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You may have noticed that I tend to quit things soon after doing them, like TV series, animated movies, book writing, broadway plays. I do feel very strongly in stopping the second I feel like I'm not excited anymore, whatever I'm doing."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The only line I quote from [Seinfeld] [...] is "If you're one of us, you'll take a bite." [...] Sometimes I'll quote Newman in flames screaming "Oh the humanity.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Newman would be my favorite supporting character. I mean, when I got to have a real evil nemesis like Superman would have, that was a dream come true for me."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I started out in comedy in the 70s, if you didn't do clean humor you weren't getting on TV, so I started doing that so I could be on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And then when I saw what other people were doing, I just always wanted to be a little different."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I would say that I am 90% serious in my day. Comedy is no joke."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I heard that they were going to do a sitcom with a secret agent who was funny, that it was going to be a comedy secret agent TV show, and it was going to be called "Get Smart," the back of my head blew off. So that was really my favorite show when I was a kid."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I would go so far as to say that was the key to the entire [Seinfeld] show, was that we really felt like together we were funny, and then the audience felt it, and that's how you can somehow catch lightning in a bottle."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We improvised virtually nothing [on Seinfeld], as a matter of fact. That's how good the actors were, that it sometimes seems like they are improvising. But we also knew each other so well that we knew exactly what sentences to put in their mouths that would seem natural."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The way I look at life, basically, is: it's exhausting. And... (laughs) Doing-- Being busy is exhausting; doing nothing is exhausting. No matter what you do... as a human -- on Earth -- it's exhausting."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't separate the mind and the body, as a thing. If my body's tired, my mind's tired; if my mind's tired, my body's tired. [...] People say "Mind and body! Mind and body!", and that-- and I dismiss that separation completely."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Nobody goes berserk eating in the morning. You never wake up in the morning and eat a decent breakfast, and then attack a box of brownies. You don't do it. But at night, we all do it! Why? We're tired. And when you're tired, your willpower goes away. Willpower requires energy."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There was [an] incredible amount of luck -- good luck -- that I had, that made [Seinfeld] what it was. On the other hand, I could argue against that. I could say "I'm the one who said to Larry David: 'Y'know, when you and I talk, it's really funny. We should write something together'.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We worked to death. Y'know? That's what Larry and I did. We did not rest, we did not... spare an ounce of effort; we would just order people out of the room: "Get out! Get out! We're working!" Y'know? And we-- And that's why those scripts were as good as they were: 'cause when they got to that table, and those actors got 'em, they were worked. So: is that luck? I don't think so. That wasn't luck. That was-- We earned that."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When I think of the things that I love: more than money, more than love, more than... just about anything, I love energy. I love it. And I pursue it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's the first thing an audience wants to feel when someone gets up on a stage: "Does this person know what they're doing?" "'Cause if they do, then I can relax." And when you're trying to elicit laughter, that's-- they have to be relaxed. If they're worried about you, the laughs are harder to get."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up is a physical challenge. It is a mental challenge, but equally physical. And when you're young, of course, it's a breeze! 'Cause you're blessed with youth. Y'know? The ultimate weapon is youth, in life."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The specific element that occurs in every single successful joke is surprise. Surprise. A line of logic is going one way, and then, it doesn't. I call it "making non-sense". You go "That doesn't make any sense, but I get it." That-- That's the words that people use to describe a joke: "I got it.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I find things that you've thought of, but don't-- that you're aware of, but haven't really analyzed. And that's the whole act!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up is a very scientific and very exhaustive study of the human experience."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If you want to be funny, you've got to have energy. Energy sells jokes. All sales requires energy, but stand-up is a hard sell. I'm sellin' you somethin' you don't even need!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Stand-up is] a martial art. It's voice, it's action, it's gesture; and everything is synchronized to land on that [weakest] point. You ever watch these karate guys? They hit that brick: it's a perfect arrow that hits that target, and when it-- and it's perfect! It's a concentration of energy. And that's what elicits the laugh."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The first thing I want to do [on stage] is: I want you to have confidence in me. Well, how am I gonna do that? I'm gonna take the joke that fails the least amount of [the] time, and I'm gonna put that at the front of the set. It's just tech-- it's scientific technique. [...] If the first thing I say gets a laugh: at that moment, 100% of everything I've said gets a laugh! And now, I've got your confidence."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedy -- and show business -- is-- look: either I win, or you win. There's no truce! Same thing with television: I knew that [Seinfeld]-- I knew-- look: either you're gonna kill me, or I'm gonna kill you. And after nine years, I was still killin' that series, but that series would eventually have killed me."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm not a big fan of the "long set" in comedy. Guys like to go on, like to do an hour and 45 minutes. The audience will win if you stay out there too long! [...] I want to go out. I want to get you down. I want to beat the snot out of you and get out of there before you realize that I... beat the odds!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I know people would want a-- a [Seinfeld] reunion show. That's what I want. My theory of show business is "Do not give the public what it wants." [...] When people stop asking you for the reunion, then you know you've blown it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If you really want to make money, never make a decision based on money. 'Cause if you make-- if you chase money, you're gonna get less of it. If you chase a thing that you love -- that's interesting -- only because you love that thing, you'll make more money. I-- I just believe that's-- in the arts, that's the only way to make money, is to never consider money as a part of your decision."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up is now easy to learn, harder to master because once you get halfway decent at it, [...] you can do other things. And if you do one other thing, you're not gonna get good at it; it's just too damn hard."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Funny is the-- is the world that I live in. You're funny? I'm interested. You're not funny? I'm not interested."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That's one of-- a beautiful thing about having kids, is you reproduce people that you can relate to."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think it's a dangerous thing for comedians to mature or-- too much. And my wife will tell you I'm doing a fantastic job of not maturing too much."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The idea of [Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee], honestly, was to try and create something that fit a whole new medium. I really was thinking "What would be a good TV show for a phone?" That was really where I started. And I thought "This would be fun for a phone, 'cause you don't have to follow a story.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I pretty much engage with funny people, or weird people, or, y'know, kind of "off" people. Anybody who's a little normal -- even just take, let's say, a normal actor or actress -- I'm lost. I got nothin'. I'm not curious; I'm not interested. You got a show? I don't care."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Being funny has not that much to do with what a great comedy act is about. A great comedy act is a machine that's built. Being funny is the fuel, but you gotta have a whole machine to burn it, and that's the act."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"For some reason, this is the big question that a regular person will ask you after a show: "How do you remember [all that]?" I don't know why they ask that. You don't have anything else to remember!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The TV only works one way. You can't just yell at me and expect me to respond positively. You have to introduce yourself first. You can't just yell "HEY JERRY, C'MERE!" and expect that to work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Who would I cast to play me? [...] You know who I think would be good? Would be Matthew Broderick. He's got a good small funny. You need a small funny to play a comedian, not a big funny. Most comedians, you know, in their daily life are small funny, it's the little looks, the little things that they say, they're not clown-y."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I could have easily done [Seinfeld] for one or two or three more years, but it would have changed the way people look back at it. I think I made the right decision. Because people like the show now even more than they did in the 1990s, because it didn't get worn out."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm very good at streamlining a series of activities so that everything gets done in the amount of time that I have. I am very good with the clock. Like if I have a lot of stuff to do and a limited amount of time, I'm very good at figuring it all out. I'm very efficient in everything that i do, I never waste time so that I have more time to waste."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"No. Books take a long time, and I don't get to hear the laughs."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There is a similar kind of feel for rhythm and tone in comedy as there is in music, I think. You have to, you know, words - you use words in the same careful way in a song that you use them in a joke. Having just the right word in just the right place seems to make it work."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"At one point, in the early 80s, I got a part on a sitcom called Benson. And I was on the show for 3 episodes, and then I got fired. And I thought that would be the only break I was ever going to get. It was just a youthful lack of perspective. But at the time, I thought that was it. But it really ended up making me really get into being a much better standup comedian so that I wouldn't be dependent on other people. It ended up being a good thing. The best things in my life have been the bad things that taught me stuff."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think funny is always kind of time-proof, so I think [Seinfeld] could have worked even today. Obviously it would have been a completely different type of show. But you know, what made the show work was the bringing together a bunch of great actors & great writers in one place at one time."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I felt as a child that i related more to blue than my own name. I have a very powerful connection with that color. And it's always been extremely important to me. It's weird, I don't understand it myself, but there's certain blues - Jeep Wrangler makes a blue that will make me stop walking on the sidewalk, and just turn and stare at it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A cat is a small sneaky animal that manages to get by without any real relationships."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I would say the advice I would give [my younger self], or any young person, would be "Keep your head up in failure, and your head down in success.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't see people in the audience, I'm in an ultra-focused state when I'm onstage, I only go by sound - I listen to the audience but I don't look at anything in particular. I'm really visualizing the stuff I'm talking about."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't know if the average person would like [being famous]. I really like it. I think it might surprise them that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. I think most people think of it as a problem, but it's all in how you look at it. But I do think that's the case, you get a lot more than it costs you in privacy invasion or whatever."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Truthfully, I loved working on every episode [of Seinfeld], we just had the best time and got along great, and there were a number of years when the show wasn't successful and we still loved it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was very surprised by Festivus catching on, but I think people just like the line rhyming Festivus with "rest of us" is 90% of it. And no presents, and you don't have to buy decorations, it's just an aluminum pole."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It really is funny, it's very easy for me to remember that [Seinfeld] was very unsuccessful for a number of years, the first 4 years, and I remember thinking "I don't know why people don't seem to like this, it seems so funny to me." But I never thought it was going to be a big success. But it worked out."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The worst advice is, you know, you have to do more to promote yourself. That's the worst advice. The best advice is to do your work, and you won't have to worry about anything else."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Being old is great. There's so many things that you're done with. Like running really fast. I was single until I was 45, and I liked that, but then I couldn't take it anymore. So when you're old, you get to relax a little bit. And you can see much more clearly of what's going on in the world. When you're young, everything is really confusing, and when you're old you can see through people and events really clearly, and I like that a lot."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think it's very strange that men like dogs and women like cats because women want attention and men want to be left alone, it should be the complete opposite."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I love advertising because I love lying. [pause for laughter] In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. I don't care that it won't be like that when I actually get the product being advertised, because in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I'm happy! And that's all I want."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"We are a hopeful species. Stupid, but hopeful."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If your things don't make you happy, you're not getting the right things!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I have always wanted a Clio. I don't know much about it... but I know it's a good award, because in 1991, they screwed up this whole presentation, and there were a bunch of awards left over, and all of these ad people here climbed up onto the stage and tried to grab them! So, to me, that says: "This means something!" That really happened, and it's my all-time favorite award-show occurrence because it was so honest. People just said "I want a damn Clio", and they went for it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Thank you all for this great honor, and for all your great work. I hope it makes you happy, as you have made me happy for this five minutes of my life, which will last until I get to the edge of this stage and it hits me that this was all a bunch of nonsense."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was a minimalist from the beginning. I think that's why I've always done well as a comedian. [...] If you always want less, in words as well as things, you'll do well as a writer."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Bee Movie was a very unhappy experience, from start to finish. I remember standing in the back of the theater and it wasn't great, but it was decent and, and I remember listening to their laughs and thinking, These laughs are shit. That was not worth it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Once I'm done with [a] bit, it either goes in the garbage or the accordion folder. Those are the only two destinations. And then it's in the air. It has to survive on its own. Bits are like turtles right after they hatch, running to the beach."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Seinfeld] gave me everything, and that was always my thought when I was doing it. If I sacrifice every cell of energy that I have doing this, the rest of my life will be pretty good. So I just died on the shield. I went to the point where I thought, If I keep going, I could lose my sanity. That was how far I took it mentally."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I've always loved getting sold [on something]. That's true of all good salesmen. All good salesmen love to get taken in by a pitch."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"What's wrong with [pursuing vanity projects]? [...] If there's no vanity, that's the end of show business."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The less you know about a field, the better your odds. Dumb boldness is the best way to approach a new challenge."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Should I mention the other shows that were on at [the same time as Seinfeld]? 'Unsolved Mysteries'? 'Alf'? Where are they? Why is there no Hulu deal for them?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It might be fun to see what it's like to run something into the ground. I missed out on that. I'm curious about it. I want to know what it's like for everyone else."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I like all jokes. Okay? That's what I do; that's what I live for. There's really nothing else I care about, than jokes. And I don't really care who the victim is or who has-- whose feelings have to be hurt. If it's a good joke, I'm into it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"What I am good at -- and what every comedian is good at -- is knowing how to carefully manage an audience's attention span."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The Internet is the most brutal medium for attention span. The distance from your finger to that "off" -- or "stop" -- is-- it's-- you're holding it right there, while you're watching the thing!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I'm a little compulsive-- a compulsive tinkerer. Y'know? I love to just "Well, let's try this, and maybe shrink that section a little bit." I mean, that's what stand-up is, is constantly moving the accordion to different sizes."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Audiences love to hear about something very stupid. Y'know? But I impose kind of an-- a very rigorous intellect to it. It's kind of philosophical, that joke about the-- y'know, "If it was really donut holes, the bag would be empty.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's absolutely no difference between the greatest painting ever made and a joke. It's just something someone invented that someone else likes! That's art. And it has no reason to exist, except its own virtue."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I had an episode [of Seinfeld] all ready to go that we were gonna do entirely -- secretly -- in claymation. And I had the studio ready, and the figures ready, and it was all good to go; and then, someone said "Y'know, Tim Allen did an animation thing", or something, "on Home Improvement last season." And I go "What? What kind of thing was it?" And I never saw it; I didn't know what it was. And I got scared off; and I thought "I don't want people to say I'm imitating Tim Allen." And I cancelled it; and I realize now that was a huge mistake."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedy is a bit of a masochistic pursuit. If you don't have a masochistic streak, I don't think you can succeed at it, 'cause so much of it is painful. You have to kind of like it, in a sick way: y'know, that this really hurts."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I do have a bucket list. And I looked at the list, and then, I decided to turn the B [into] an F, and I was done with it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I believe in detailed notes and jokes, and also winging it onstage. But, not for your first open mic. For your first open mic, my advice to you would be to make sure you have what you're gonna do memorized, to the point that one of your friends can gently slap you across the face, and you'll still be able to get it out of your mouth."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't do movies because I think generally the size of that content does not lend itself to great comedy; it lends itself to people saying, "Hey, I made a movie." To me, the funniest things are shorter, so I think TV series or comedians in cars, I think I have a better chance of making you laugh."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I actually have quite a bit of [the Seinfeld set], and we're looking for a museum that wants to display it. I have the couch, I have the two blue stools, I have the table and chairs; the coolest thing I have is the door, which we never repainted in nine seasons. It has every scuff mark that Kramer put on it with all those crazy entrances."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I did swear a little bit in the beginning [of my stand-up career] and then I didn't like how easy it was. It felt like cheating, so I stopped."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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""Funniest" is completely personal. Whoever you think is funniest, is funniest."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think the best Seinfeld episode idea I ever contributed was that George pretending to be a marine biologist would find Kramer's golf ball in the blowhole of the whale. Believe it or not, we were doing both of those stories without seeing any connection that Kramer was gonna hit golf balls at the beach, and George was gonna be pretending to be a marine biologist. And it was in the middle of the week that it suddenly hit me of a way to connect the two stories."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The sad truth is, people are only interested in themselves. So, if you just ask them what they are doing or what’s going on or how they feel, they generally go on for hours."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I have often wondered if there's a way to teach being funny or comedy, and George Stephanopoulos actually got me wound up enough at one point that we were going to contact, I think his name was Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia, and we were gonna go in there, and I was going to teach a course on comedy. Because I know a lot about it, but I just don't know if it's teachable."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Bee Movie was definitely my favorite movie that I've starred in, because I've always wanted to be a bee. They seem to have the most organized society on earth, and they make honey! Which is a pretty amazing product."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The best advice I ever got was from Rodney Dangerfield, who when I asked him a question about something in comedy, just looked at me for a second and then went, "You'll figure it out.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Learning to be a writer is the delta of success and failure in comedy."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A lot of comedy sounds like you're driving to a point of logic or perspective, and you're really just setting up a joke!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"It is not easy to find someone who you can say to "That's not funny", and they're not gonna get upset. Y'know? Really hard to do that. Most comedians are very defensive, very protective of their stuff. And even if you may be a person of accomplishment, they don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear from anybody!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I like the brutality of stand-up and the simple, boiled-down "it either lives or dies" of a joke."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Inexplicable malevolence was our favorite thing [on Seinfeld]. There's no reason-- There was never a reason I didn't like Newman; there was no reason. "We just think it's better to hate this guy.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's this little thing of "I want to say this" and "I want to be funny". And that little balance: if it's a little-- if it's one inch above -- (raises one hand) "I really want to say this" and (lowers other hand) "It's not that funny" -- (snaps fingers) the audience will just-- they will recoil instantly. It's like "You're preaching", or "You're trying to make some stupid point". Y'know? And they just-- (recoils) But if it's always "This is really funny and it says something", then you're okay."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I want comedians to always push themselves to be bigger than the niche that they start in. [...] You work to get broader and broader, without being generic or pandering. And to me, that is the mission."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Get bigger! Don't just play to the people that get you. Play to the people that don't get you, and you'll get better!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Great steering is, to me, the essence of the automotive experience."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I love art! It's great. But a guy with his hands on his face is not worth $100M. (laughs) "Screaming!" Okay? So, he's screaming. Fine. I'm not getting 100M value here: (imitates "The Scream")"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Here's the dumbest thing car people will think: you'll look at some car that you have and you['ll] go "Do I really need that?" That's the dumbest question! You didn't need any of it! [...] "Need" is not an applicable verb in this world."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Most comedians do not relate to cars. I don't know why."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A great joke and a great car: everything on it works. And there's nothing excessive that doesn't make sense or doesn't need to be there. [...] To me, the Speedster and a great piece of comedy are identical: they're perfectly minimalized ideas."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The time-travel aspect of old cars, to me, is a big part of the fun. [...] I live out in East Hampton, and there's a lot of roads out there where you can't tell what year it is. So, if you get in a '63 -- and that's a '63-- everything on it was made in '63 -- you can kind of go into that little dream, like "Well, gee, if I was-- had this car in that year, this-- it would be just like this!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was the only guy, by the way, in the early '80s [who] was welcome on your show and Carson; usually, it was kind of-- that was-- there was a bit of a wall there. [...] If you were a Carson comic, you were probably not young enough or cool enough for Late Night. And vice-versa. But I for some reason was able to go back and forth, and I was always very proud of that, in the early days."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A comedian is a-- to me, a-- a full-fledged-- not only a monologist, but somebody who can really work a room, work a crowd, and has a real act. A comic? That's a-- like-- I think a notch down."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Talent is a horse that [you] just find yourself on. And the extent to which you can learn to ride it -- or it guides you or even throws you-- I mean, Freddie Prinze is a perfect example of a guy [who was] sitting on a stallion, but had no clue how to ride it. [...] That's [how] I think of a career, as kind of a rider and a horse: you trying to control this talent."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The thing that's great about [having] kids is: they don't care what you think is great. [...] Everything you like, they've got to take the other side. That's the great balancing thing of kids: they're not impressed with anything you're impressed with."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The secret to television is: the person who gets the opportunity wants to "re-form" this type of content to them, personally."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Larry and I were so good together [on Seinfeld], if we both thought something was funny, that was good enough. That's it. If it can get through those two filters, and we both think "That's funny", I don't even-- I wouldn't even care if it wasn't funny."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I love when a critic reviews a stand-up comedian. You want to go "I've left town already, with the money!" (laughs) "I don't care what you think.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"[Stand-up comedy] is the ultimate democracy. The laugh is the vote."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stand-up comedy's also the most mysterious profession in show business. It's completely shrouded in [the] mystery of "How do these people do it?" [...] Only other comedians understand it. It's like, y'know, being a cop or a prostitute: you can only hang out with other people [who] do that."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You have the Sun-Maid company, and then you have the Raisinet people. I just think it's interesting that after 80 years, Sun-Maid finally went "Hey, why don't we put some chocolate on it?" Like, imagine not thinking of that for 80 years!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The real concept of [Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee] is: being a comedian is two things. One is: there's a show you do at night, for an audience, that you get paid for; but most of your life is hanging out during the day with other comedians, waiting for night... to do your show! [...] So, you have your set, but then, you hang out with these other people that are like yourself: they're a little socially awkward; they have this comedic aspect of their brain that they cannot turn off... and have difficulty having normal conversations with people, because we just want to say foul, obnoxious, hilarious things to make each other laugh. So, I thought "What if I tried to show people this side of the comedian life?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Cars are really the most sophisticated adult toys that you can use without having to really talk to anybody."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Every car has a personality. Every car is trying to say something to the world."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"On [Seinfeld], we were extremely meticulous in our scripting of every scene, every joke, every line. [...] When people came on that show, they were told by script supervisors "You don't change one comma", because that's-- the precision of joke-making generally requires that."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's no "putting an act together". Okay? A stand-up comedian is an act. You are an act. You breathe and live an act. It's not assembled; it's not-- This is not Hello, Dolly!. It's constant, it's organic; you live inside it. It's like a snow globe. Comedy is a snow globe. You live in it."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Here's the other big secret of comedy: the audience writes most of it. You kind of give them what you think is funny, and they "grade" your work, second to second. [...] "Good word", "bad word"."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The only reason people still exist is phones need pockets to ride around in."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"If you like a daily slight terror, you will like being a stand-up comedian."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Comedy is so much closer to sports than the arts. Stand-up comedy is very, very close to sports: in the life of it, and the "do or die" of it. [...] Nobody cares how many hits you've had. There's guys on base now."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I want to look like my heroes from the '60s. I want to look like Frank Gorshin, and old George Carlin, and Alan King. I love[d] those guys. So, I wanted to be those guys."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think people like a little more "personal revelation" in their comedy. And that's fine! They have-- There's three generations behind me doin' it. But my thing is: I want a number of jokes of a certain quality, and laughs. I want the room to just be ringin with laughs."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"When you hear a curse word in the last line of [a comedian's] bit... that's when you know: "not solved." (laughs) "That puzzle was not solved.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The reason I got [Seinfeld] is: my manager, George Shapiro, wrote a note to Brandon Tartikoff, the President of NBC, and it was one sentence; he said "Call me a crazy guy, but I think some day Jerry Seinfeld's gonna be doing a series on NBC." Now, when he wrote that note, it was... 1988. I had been on The Tonight Show for seven years -- three times a year -- destroying. [...] And George still [had] to say to NBC "I know this sounds crazy...". I thought of this just the other week: "What was so crazy about the idea?""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"That was the dominance of network television at that time. There was no competition. [Theirs] was the only game in town. A guy like me-- Could you ima-- I would never have gotten past my second set, today, before they would've grabbed me! Right? "Hey, this guy's pretty good!" "Just grab him! Let's do-- Somebody come up with somethin' for this kid!""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Most of the time, comedians: we are expected to be the most agile, in terms of how we think and construct our thoughts and our-- what comes out of our mouth[s]. That's how we got the job. Y'know? So, I'm not really worried about [...] comedians as a group. We have been navigating these slalom gates forever."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I don't hear the applause when I come out [on stage]. I have no interest in that. 'Cause that's for the past. They're saying "We like what you've done in the past." And that's not what tonight's about. Tonight's about tonight. We gotta make this happen tonight. I want you to go home tonight and go "We saw a great show.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I was lucky in that I was introduced to fame very-- in a very slow, incremental way."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Stories about your children are not good stories. They're not interesting, amusing, or relatable. [...] That took me a long time to learn. And a lot-- I have a lot of friends with kids that don't know it: what happened with your kid this morning at breakfast is not funny."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The concept of writing is so alien-- actual writing is so alien to most comedians."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"There's something about [writing] -- whether it's a cubicle allegory, or it's a homework or schoolwork metaphor -- there's something about it that totally repels the comic mind. "I can't-- I'm not doin' that. That's work!" Which it is, but only in the beginning! Only in the first ten, fifteen minutes, right? Then, you're kind of havin' fun! You're makin' up stuff. Who cares if it works? Who cares?"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The guy on stage: I made that up. The real me is alone, in the room; that's who I am. I learned that-- the skill of people."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A joke is a miracle."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I really think an honest minimum is five years between [hour specials]. That would be a really honest-- and workin' hard!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"A real artist -- a real artist -- does what they want to do. And that-- and I'm not talking about being indulgent; I'm talking about "That joke is good enough -- for me -- to make my set-- to be in my set.""

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You ever wonder why Silicon Valley even exists? I have always wondered, why do these people all live and work in that location? They have all this insane technology; why don't they all just spread out wherever they want to be and connect with their devices? Because it doesn't work, that's why."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I always describe my upbringing as "benign neglect": that I was-- I really felt like my parents were just letting me live there 'til I grew up."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"I think the duck really is the perfect model of how to live: paddle as hard as you can beneath the surface, let everything else roll off your back, and have a little sense of humor about your appearance."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"The key to marriage -- of course -- is to make the other person happy. I tell all my guy friends: "Make your wife happy. You're not gonna be happy, so don't even worry about that. And that's good, 'cause that cuts your work in half!" And... further: that men don't want to be happy. We don't know what [happiness] is. We don't care what it is. We've never experienced it and couldn't be less interested in it. We just want to do whatever stupid thing it is that we're doing; that's men."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Here's the great thing about writing: you don't have to do it. All you have to do is not do anything else in that time frame. So: you put your idea down and... now, you don't have to do anything. You just sit there and you eventually will realize "There's a problem here." Right? And your brain will naturally try and solve the problem, and the next thing you know, you're writing! So, it's not about forcing yourself to write; it's about creating a -- what do we call it? -- a "discrete space". Is that the right word? So, that's how you write: create a place and time where that's what's happening... but you don't have to write! Just be there with the problem."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"No one else has his work ethic or his clarity of vision, his passion for the craft."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Jerry killed himself to make Seinfeld good. He and Larry David worked so hard, it is-- actually, it is impossible to describe. And they didn't just do it to make the show successful, because once it was successful, they worked even harder."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"You've always been one of the nicest guys in the business. [...] You've always been ethical, classy, smooth, and the best stand-up comic of our generation."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Jerry Seinfeld, one of the greatest comedians of all time and one of the cockiest bastards to ever live. [...] To his credit, he writes some of the best jokes ever."

- Jerry Seinfeld

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"Mel [Gibson] will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number."

- Patrick McGoohan

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"The village is a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is Number Six and will live there happily as Number Six for ever after. [...] And this is the one rebel that they can't break."

- Patrick McGoohan

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"When they did finally see it, there was a near-riot and I was going to be lynched. And I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks, until things calmed down. That's really true!"

- Patrick McGoohan

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"I am never quite sure whether I am one of the cinema's elder statesmen or just the oldest whore on the beat."

- Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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"I have a lot to be sad about. Not bitter in any way. But I think it can be fairly said that I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture."

- Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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"I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, "No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk." Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard."

- Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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"Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script."

- Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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"First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"Yeah, yeah, I know I got rid of the headache. Now I got cancer."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"What you doin' with such a big ol' dog in New York?" "Never had a wife."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"Indians don't last in prison. They weren't born for it like the whites."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"Twenty-one years between first and second films is longer than any director should have to wait. The case of Polonsky is one of the most dismal hangovers from the McCarthy period."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"Polonsky, along with Chaplin and Losey, remains one of the great casualties of the anti-Communist hysteria of the fifties."

- Abraham Polonsky

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"The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"There are no second acts in American lives."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling..."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The shadow of a dove Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies; brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender tenuous thunder . . . But I wait . . . Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain — Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, Happier winds that pile her hair; Again They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air Upon me, winds that I know, and storm."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he has passed...."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . ."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all — ""

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.” “What is it?” “That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"In the case of Beatrice’s money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that his father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"ROSALIND: Mother, I never think about money. MRS. CONNAGE: You never keep it long enough to think about it."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The victor belongs to the spoils."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"To Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed — it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him — he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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""Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular — I am idling, I have idled, I will idle."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own. During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer "The Offshore Pirate." But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you'll like."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several generations."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts — " "That's nothing." Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. "That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived — and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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""You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?" As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool. "O Russet Witch!" But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Those were the days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was..."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror — that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"That Kitty was capable of any deep grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture flashed before him — of Kitty's arms around some man whose face he could not see, of Kitty's lips pressed close to other lips in what was surely: passion."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"They're all deserting me. I've been too kind. Spare the rod and spoil the fun. Oh, for the glands of a Bismarck."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"'Look here, old sport, [...] what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.' (From: The Offshore Pirate)"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.(From: A Diamond As Big as The Ritz)"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.(From: The Freshest Boy)"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. And it's these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It takes a genius to whine appealingly."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich booy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she [his daughter Scottie] can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation — and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"F. Scott Fitzgerald, who collaborated with Budd Schulberg on the 1939 Winter Carnival, discovered that conversations with Hollywood Communists tended to be one-sided. "The important thing is that you should not argue with them," Fitzgerald wrote. "Whatever you say they have a way of twisting it into shapes which put you into some lower category of mankind, 'Fascist,' 'Liberal,' 'Trotskyist,' and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.""

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I identified a lot with The Crackup as a high school student, and I wrote my college entrance exam on that book. I totally identified with it on the psychic level. He's trying to keep himself from cracking up, and I felt all kinds of schizophrenic things about being Chinese and being American."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I came across Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I used to hate S.F. and not even see he was good. I still dislike him but realize he could write..."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"The real Scott is to be found in his notebooks and working papers, where he elaborated so patiently at turning the mess of his life to gold. "To observe one must be unwary," he wrote, so he took experience straight without a notebook. But he later hoarded it like a miser and pored over it like a monk illuminating a manuscript and produced enduring work. When a writer explores emotions to danger point like Scott, it is worse than philistine to talk about weakness of character. The whole moral test is in the books. The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are all the character reference a writer could want."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"I have a personal theory that one reason Hemingway became so exasperated with him was that Daddy almost never got his name right."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"These problems do not disappear just because we do not hear about them. There is so much more happening around the world than what is communicated to us about the top stories we do hear. We all need to look deeper and discover for ourselves.... What is the problem? Where is it? How can we help to solve it?"

- Angelina Jolie

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"It is especially shocking that such a tragedy can go on, year after year, with the rest of the world paying so little attention to it. My Christmas message to Colombian refugees and to the millions of displaced people in Colombia is that the world has not totally forgotten them."

- Angelina Jolie

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"I was horrified by the attacks against her, [but] Madonna knew the situation in Malawi, where he was born. In that country, there isn't really a legal framework for adopting. Personally, I prefer to stay on the side of the law."

- Angelina Jolie

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"I was a member of a group called the Kissy Girls. I was very sexual in kindergarten. I created a game where I would kiss the boys and give them cooties. Then we would make out and we would take our clothes off. I got in a lot of trouble!"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add to the person you become.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“If every choice you make comes from an honest place, you’re solid, and nothing anybody can say about you can rock you or change your opinion.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different....I'd rather be completely fucking mental."

- Angelina Jolie

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"Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life."

- Angelina Jolie

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"You’d think, ‘What if I make a mistake today, I’ll regret it’. I don’t believe in regret, I feel everything leads us to where we are and we have to just jump forward, mean well, commit and just see what happens."

- Angelina Jolie

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"Love one person, take care of them until you die. You know, raise kids. Have a good life. Be a good friend. And try to be completely who you are. And figure out what you personally love. And like go after it with everything you've got no matter how much it takes."

- Angelina Jolie

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"The great thing about having a bunch of kids is that they just remind you that you're the person who takes them to go poop,"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict… There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex — everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"Every day we chose who we are by how we define ourselves."

- Angelina Jolie

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"It's not going to accomplish anything to cry."

- Angelina Jolie

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"Figure out who you are separate from your family and the man or woman you're in a relationship with, Find who you are in this world and what you need to feel good alone. I think that's the most important thing in life. Find a sense of self because with that, you can do anything else."

- Angelina Jolie

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". “I’ve realized that being happy is a choice. You never want to rub anybody the wrong way or not be fun to be around, but you have to be happy.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly."

- Angelina Jolie

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"“If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.”"

- Angelina Jolie

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"We want to help young people to identify who or what is blocking them from accessing their human rights, and how to try to overcome that. The message to young people is, no one has the right to harm you, to silence you."

- Angelina Jolie

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"Know Your Rights And Claim Them"

- Angelina Jolie

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"I've been reckless, but I'm not a rebel without a cause"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“My body reacts very strongly to stress"

- Angelina Jolie

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"“Brad will continue to respond in court as he has consistently done,” she added."

- Angelina Jolie

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"Since her appointment as a Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina has more than fulfilled my expectations. She has proven to be a close partner and a genuine colleague in our efforts to find solutions for the world’s refugees. Above all, she has helped to make the tragedy of refugees real to everyone who will listen. Angelina’s interest in helping refugees, her personal generosity, and her truly compassionate spirit are an inspiration to us all."

- Angelina Jolie

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"… an off-screen persona of Globally Conscious Earth Mother and an aggressive on-screen embodiment of Kali, Goddess of Destruction."

- Angelina Jolie

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"I've also gotten weird letters, suicide letters, girls threatening to jump if I don't get in touch with them. So you think, "This is bullshit," but then you think, "What if it's not? Who wants to take that chance?" I write them back, tell them to hang in there, if things are that bad, they have to get better. But I'm not altogether stable myself, so who am I to give advice?"

- Johnny Depp

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"When I was a kid back in Kentucky, we went to this church where my uncle preached. It was kind of a weird Baptist, full-on kind of place. People kept running up to the pulpit and grabbing his ankles and being saved. Lots of crying. Even then, at six or seven, I questioned how pure the emotion could be if it were on such display."

- Johnny Depp

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"We're all a mishmash of extremes. I know that I have demons. I don't know if I want to get rid of them altogether, but I would like to experience them in a different way. Maybe go face to face with them. I've never really had the time to go to therapy. Well, here and there. But not enough to help me."

- Johnny Depp

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"I despise those prick actors who say, "I was in character," and "I became the character," and all that stuff. It's hideous. It's just masturbation at the highest level."

- Johnny Depp

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"I see kids who are complete cynics. They're not dreaming. They're out there with high-powered weapons, smoking crack behind the 7-Eleven. They've seen it all. These kids are going to take us into 2000 and beyond. That's scary, man. I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic or optimistic. I'm more realistic, I guess. But not cynical. I look. I watch."

- Johnny Depp

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"I'm not a Blockbuster boy, I never wanted to be. I just don't want to look back in 30 or 40 or 50 years and have my grandkids say, "You did a lot of stupid shit, Granddad. What an idiot you were, smiling for the cameras and playing the game.""

- Johnny Depp

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"I had an incident with a really dumb magazine called Voici where they printed a photograph of Lily-Rose, a long-lens shot from very far away, and I just went ballistic. You can sue them — I've sued a couple of times, Vanessa's sued and we win every time — but this time I was beyond suing. I just wanted to beat whoever was responsible into the earth — I just wanted to rip him apart.So I tracked him down and gave him a few suggestions about how to live life and stay healthy and he took my advice. Because that's just unacceptable. They can do anything they want to me — and most tabloids have — but not my kid, not my pure, innocent little baby. She didn't ask to be in this circus."

- Johnny Depp

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"I'd like to think I was reborn May 27, 1999 [when his daughter Lily-Rose was born]. Everything changed once I held [her] in my arms, and those innocent eyes stared into mine. Until that moment, I had been possessed with 'me' and 'my career.' Suddenly, there was someone who depended on me, who I was responsible for."

- Johnny Depp

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"Lily-Rose is 2-1/2, and each day is a new discovery for her. I want to be there and live it with her. When she was 6 months old, I held a paint brush in her hand. By the time she was 1, I was guiding her hand to paint with acrylics. Also, I showed how to keep her brushes clean. Now, she's intrigued by pastels and going through her 'purple phase.' "She's developing from abstract into more figurative. [showing a fax of his daughter's latest effort: a picture of daddy] See the shape of my head, my hair, my shoulder? An exact likeness. If I had my wish, she'd be a painter. That's why I'm keeping her sketches, even this fax. Someday, if she becomes famous, I can take it to the bank."

- Johnny Depp

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""Film star," "movie star" — whatever they want to try to call you is limiting, in the sense that I think an actor has to be able to play characters. To separate these things — you know: "leading man," "action hero," "character actor," stuff like that — I guess if I want to be close to anything, it would be a character actor, which is what I think an actor should be. So any of that "movie star" stuff, I just don't buy it. It just doesn't make sense to me."

- Johnny Depp

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"I want to do kiddie movies now. I'm fed up with adult movies — most of them stink. At a certain point with movies it becomes all about mathematics: this has to lead up to this, this has to lead up to that — you're always bound by some kind of formula. But since having kids and watching lots of animated cartoons and all those great old Disney films, I think they're better, they're much better. They're more fun and they take more risks."

- Johnny Depp

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"I always figured that once I wrapped a film, then anything beyond that is none of my business. If I can avoid seeing the final product, then all I have in my head is feeling good about the experience."

- Johnny Depp

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"The ultimate for me would be to do a feature that didn't require any narrative structure."

- Johnny Depp

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"The real movie stars were Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift. How could I put myself in the same category as Clark Gable? Tom Cruise is a great movie star. Do I consider myself a movie star? I consider myself a guy with a good job, an interesting job."

- Johnny Depp

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"I do have an affinity for damaged people, in life, in roles. I don't know why. We're all damaged in our own way. Nobody's perfect. I think we are all somewhat screwy, every single one of us."

- Johnny Depp

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"Depp: I would never be disrespectful to my country, to the people, especially the kids who are over there serving in the armed forces. My uncle was wounded in Vietnam, paralyzed from the neck down. I would never say those things the way they claim I said them. Interviewer: What exactly did you say? Depp: I essentially said the United States is a very young country compared with Europe. We're still growing. That's it. I wouldn't say anything anti-American. I'm an American, and I love my country. Interviewer: What's your view of President Bush? Depp: What can I say? He's somebody's kid. He's somebody's father. God bless him. Good luck. You know what I mean? I don't agree with his politics, and I'm not going to pretend to, but I don't agree with a lot of people's politics."

- Johnny Depp

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"When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff."

- Johnny Depp

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"I just don’t quite understand it [the press], really. I don’t understand the animal. It’s a strange, roundabout way of selling something; it leaves a foul taste... The thing that fascinates me is: who cares what an actor thinks?"

- Johnny Depp

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"I’ve known that there have been a kind of select group of people, amazing die-hard supporters, even through some of the more, shall we say, odd films. These people, bless them, have stuck with me the whole length of the road. To say that you appreciate it is not nearly enough. It’s part of the essence, or fuel, of what keeps you going.These people are my boss; they’re the ones who keep me employed. A couple of times, they could have said, Let’s abandon him. And they haven’t. You don’t want to let them down."

- Johnny Depp

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"Awards are not as important to me as when I meet a 10-year-old kid who says, "I love Captain Jack Sparrow.""

- Johnny Depp

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"I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite."

- Johnny Depp

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"We watched everything...A family favorite was Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp. Whenever the John Waters film broke out in song, we would all scream and start singing, too."

- Johnny Depp

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"I'm actually pretty athletic. I have to work out just to look fat."

- Will Ferrell

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"Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it's not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids — human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard. And Star Trek is about those things."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will — and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"I think God is as much a basic ingredient in the universe as neutrons and positrons . . . God is, for lack of a better term, clout. This is the prime force, when we look around the universe."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"I do not belong to any church, but I do consider myself a religious man...part of the creative and intelligence behind life. Therefore, if we are part of God than our lives are not brief meaningless things, but rather have a great importance and significance."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"I listened to the sermon, and I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy. It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, "This is a bunch of cannibals they've put me down among!" For some time, I puzzled over this and puzzled over why they were saying these things, because the connection between what they were saying and reality was very tenuous. How the hell did Jesus become something to be eaten? I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense--largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn't see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that I think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. I began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place. ... My own feeling is that relation to God as a person is a petty, superstitious approach to the All, the infinite."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He dreamed of much for us, and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare ...and always irreplaceable."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"The whole show was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but to take a special delight, in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. We tried to say that the worst possible thing that can happen to all of us is for the future to somehow press us into a common mold where we begin to act, and talk, and look, and think alike. If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"Time is the fire in which we burn."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"He looked at me and said, "The difference between your agent and me is that your agent can't get you out of here at five o’clock on Friday and I can. And all it'll cost you is twenty percent". "Gene, I can't do that to this agent," I said. "He got me the job." And then he said, and I will never forget his exact words, "Well, you're just going to have to learn how to bow down and say master.""

- Gene Roddenberry

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"He was a chiseler who wanted a cut of outside money his cast earned, demanded to be called 'master,' and prohibited poor Nimoy from using a company pencil."

- Gene Roddenberry

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"My primary concept in approaching the production of THX 1138 was to make a kind of theater verité film of the future — something that would look like a documentary crew had made a film about some character in a time yet to come. No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance — and a whole lot of luck."

- George Lucas

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"He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven. … He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a really strange relationship. …This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It's not as blatant as we're talking about. You don't think about it that much. You don't immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. "I was jail bait the last time we were together." She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, "I was fifteen years old." Even if we don't mention it, when we go to cast the part we're going to end up with a woman who's about twenty-three and a hero who's about thirty- five."

- George Lucas

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"It was insane, I wish I had filmed it. It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking, 'Do you know why she is smiling?' 'Sorry Leonardo, you'll have to make some changes.' At least the audience understood that THX was not a love story set in the 25th-century, which was the way Warners had planned to advertise it. Instead, the company settled for 'Visit the future, where love is the ultimate crime.'"

- George Lucas

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"The Johnson film wasn't terrible. I just didn't agree with the politics. I'm not a fan of big government and propaganda films are distasteful."

- George Lucas

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"We say, 'We think you are a talented, functioning person, and we are hiring you because of your abilities, and whatever you come up with, we're going to take.' If we make a mistake, it will be in picking the wrong person. What we're striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released and be completely free to express ourselves. That's very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money to have the power to be free. So the danger is — in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We're going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall. But if we fail, it's another saga in the history of man..."

- George Lucas

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"One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Visual effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People tend to confuse them as an end to themselves. A visual effect without a story is a pretty boring thing."

- George Lucas

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"Don't avoid the cliches — they are cliches because they work!"

- George Lucas

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"People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as "when life begins" or "when it should be appropriately terminated," but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavor. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race."

- George Lucas

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"Sound is half the experience of seeing a film. That's why I have been bothered by the poor sound re-production in many theaters and most homes."

- George Lucas

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"Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives … and you can either help somebody, you can be compassionate toward people, you can treat some people with dignity — or not. And … one way you become a hero, and the other way … you’re part of the problem. And … it’s not a grand thing, you know; you don’t have to get into a giant laser-sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become a hero. I mean — it’s a very small thing that happens every day of your life."

- George Lucas

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"There is no Episode VII...Not about Luke Skywalker, not about, you know, that group of people and that struggle to bring democracy back to the galaxy."

- George Lucas

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"As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things… I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will wake people to the situation. … When I wrote it [Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith], Iraq didn't exist… We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn't think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam… The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable… [In ancient Rome,] why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew? Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany and Hitler. … You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody's squabbling, there's corruption."

- George Lucas

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"One of the amazing things about 'Seven Samurai' is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you've got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said."

- George Lucas

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"The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it's told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people."

- George Lucas

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"Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood."

- George Lucas

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"The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this? They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it."

- George Lucas

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"No, I like my own characters. I want to get Anakin and Obi-Wan in. I want to give Anakin a padawan Let's take that girl there."

- George Lucas

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"Anakin Skywalker has a Padawan. Anakin has a Padawan."

- George Lucas

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"It's Star Wars starring an eleven-year-old girl"

- George Lucas

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"Pleasure's fun. It's great, but you can't keep it going forever; just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe then again, it will come back, and you'll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about your pleasure: it's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion, that is created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else, or something else. And it's a kind of thing that is, in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. You get hung up on pleasure; you're doomed. If you pursue joy; you will find everlasting happiness."

- George Lucas

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"In the world we live in - and the system we've created for ourselves, in terms of it's a big industry - you cannot lose money. So the point is that you're forced to make a particular kind of movie. And I used to say this all the time, with people, you know, back when Russia was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and they'd say: "Oh, but aren’t you so glad that you're in America?" And I'd say: "Well, I know a lot of Russian filmmakers and they have a lot more freedom than I have. All they have to do is be careful about criticizing the government. Otherwise, they can do anything they want"."

- George Lucas

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"[P]eople are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit. Yes, of course I knew. We all knew. The only one who didn’t know was George Lucas. We kept it from him, because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression—and he fooled us even then. He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expression for him[,] and THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression. Not only was he virtually expressionless in those days, but he also hardly talked at all. His only two directions to the three of us in the first film were "faster" and "more intense.""

- George Lucas

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"Attention vermin, you are in the presence of a colossus."

- Jared Hess

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"There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."

- Lillian Hellman

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"For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier."

- Lillian Hellman

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"I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself. But I am advised by counsel that if I answer the committee’s questions about myself, I must also answer questions about other people and that if I refuse to do so, I can be cited for contempt. My counsel tells me that if I answer questions about myself, I will have waived my rights under the fifth amendment and could be forced legally to answer questions about others. This is very difficult for a layman to understand. But there is one principle that I do understand: I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive. I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group."

- Lillian Hellman

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"I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the fifth amendment at the hearing."

- Lillian Hellman

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"A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young."

- Lillian Hellman

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"We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber can believe in an unprejudiced point of view but, simply in self-interest, the biographer must try for one, or make us believe he has, or tell us that he hasn't."

- Lillian Hellman

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"I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak."

- Lillian Hellman

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"To many intellectuals the radicals had become the chief, perhaps the only, enemy. … Not alone because the radical's reasons were suspect but because his convictions would lead to a world that deprived the rest of us of what we had. Very few people were capable of admitting anything so simple. But the antiradical camp contained the same divisions: often they were honest and thoughtful men, often they were men who turned down a dark road for dark reasons. But radicalism or anti-radicalism should have had nothing to do with the sly, miserable methods of McCarthy, Nixon and colleagues, as they flailed at Communists, near-Communists, and nowhere-near Communists. Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"

- Lillian Hellman

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"Sad is a fake word for me to be using, I am still angry that their reason for disagreeing with McCarthy was too often his crude methods. . . . Many of the anti-Communists were, of course, honest men. But none of them . . . has stepped forward to admit a mistake. It is not necessary in this country; they too know that we are a people who do not remember much. I have written here that I have recovered. I mean it only in a worldly sense because I do not believe in recovery. The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be."

- Lillian Hellman

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"I think she is one of our ablest playwrights. As a playwright I have tremendous respect for her. As a person she is not my cup of tea."

- Lillian Hellman

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"During breakfast the next morning, my assistant called. "Have you seen the papers?" she said. "Hellman is suing Mary McCarthy, PBS, and you for two and a quarter million." "And me?" I replied, in a prepubescent squeak. The other phone rang, and the familiar whiskey-and-cigarettes baritone rasped, "Why the hell didn’t you defend me?" "I guess I never thought of you as defenseless, Lillian," I managed. "That’s bullshit. I’m suing the whole damn bunch of you." In that, at least, she proved a woman of her word. I had been to dinner at Lillian’s, and she, too, had been on my show. She was a sharp and entertaining guest—an eager appearer, arriving early, looking as if she’d just stepped out of Elizabeth Arden. No one was neutral about Lillian. She had a famous friendship with Dorothy Parker, yet to Jean Stafford she was "Old Scaly Bird." A professional critic talking about a public figure is rarely the stuff of lawsuits. Incredibly, Hellman denied being a public figure, forgetting, perhaps, that she had recently appeared in a national advertising campaign for Blackglama furs, which used only women who were so identifiable that their names were omitted; the copy read "What becomes a legend most?""

- Lillian Hellman

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"You are reminded that this subject has a national reputation through her writings in which she has opposed Nazism and fascism. Under no circumstances should it be known that this bureau is conducting an investigation of her. It should be handled in a most discreet manner and under no circumstances should it be assigned to the local police or some other agency."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Today, when every form of perversion except masturbation and bestiality have been shown on the screen, Hellman, Wyler and the Mirisch Co. apparently thought a re-do of The Children's Hour would sell tickets if lesbianism were not only restored as the charge the evil child falsely brings, but also condoned … There is an explicit line of dialogue which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it — a claim disapproved by the number of lesbians who become insane and/or commit suicide."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the"."

- Lillian Hellman

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"If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on."

- Lillian Hellman

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"Nadine Gordimer writes about black people with such astounding sensibilities and sensitivity-not patronizing, not romantic, just real. And Eudora Welty does the same thing. Lillian Hellman has done it. Now, we might categorize these women as geniuses of a certain sort, but if they can write about it, it means that it is possible. They didn't say, "Oh, my God, I can't write about black people"; it didn't stop them. There are white people who do respond that way though, assuming there's some huge barrier. But if you can relate to Beowolf and Jesus Christ when you read about them, it shouldn't be so difficult to relate to black literature."

- Lillian Hellman

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"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

- Lillian Hellman

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"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"Life is too short to be miserable."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"No animal on the face of the earth could conceive of taxation. You and I work roughly six months a year to pay our local, state and federal taxes. If nothing else, this should convince you that animals are smarter than people."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"Normal is the average of deviance."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I also think living in the country gives you faith. All you have to do is get up and look at the mountains and look at the other animals to realize that your problems are mostly made up or exacerbated by humans. But human life isn't necessarily life. There's so much more out there."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off. Also, a comic vision is my natural world view, but I've grown up in spite of myself and I can pass the comic twist if it detracts from what the characters need. Yes, the life of a saint is hard."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person... but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right. Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I also look at people like Rita Mae Brown and some of the writers who were supported by small presses that have switched over to mainstream presses. That's all right-that's their choice. But the fact is that I'm sensitive to the publishing history of dykes and women of color. It was women who put my work in print and I'm not going to turn my back on them. Ideally, I would like to do both: publish with a small press and enlarge my audience by publishing with a mainstream press."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I had managed to rationalize my shock and dismay when I found the narrator of Ruby fruit Jungle describing the fat Jewish girl Barbara Spangenthau as someone who "always had her hand in her pants playing with herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." In 1974, as an emerging lesbian, I didn't want to admit that the movement's leading fiction writer was basing her humor on age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes. I simply couldn't afford to take it in. So I kept silent. In those early years of struggle it seemed unworthy to make a fuss. And worse-it seemed divisive. I could not yet claim my anger. I wanted too much to belong"

- Rita Mae Brown

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"In the early 1970s, women started national networks of small presses, such as Daughters Inc., which published Rita Mae Brown's groundbreaking lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results."

- Rita Mae Brown

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"I would put my pilot out on the Internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set."

- John Rogers

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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

- John Rogers

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"This...is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck."

- John Rogers

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"Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk."

- Michael Chabon

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"Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them."

- Michael Chabon

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"The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria."

- Michael Chabon

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"I have staked my career—my life itself—on the things I could see, on the stories I could credit, and on the eventual vindication, when the book was closed, of the reasonable and skeptical approach. In the face of twenty-five years of bloodshed, mayhem, criminality, and the universal human pastime of ruination, I have clung fiercely to Occam’s razor, seeking always to keep my solutions unadorned and free of conjecture, and never to resort to conspiracy or any kind of prosecutorial woolgathering. My mother, whenever she was confronted by calamity or personal sorrow, invoked cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues; it has been the business of my life to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation. But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line."

- Michael Chabon

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"When I first set my sights on becoming a writer at age eleven or so, I wanted to be a fantasy and science fiction writer. That was my preferred reading material and that's what I thought I was going to write. That's always been there. You can even see little hints of it in Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys."

- Michael Chabon

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"I think it was when I got to the butterflies -- in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology -- that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor."

- Michael Chabon

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"I would give a good deal of money, blood, books or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven or only halfway there or, worst of all, as promising, or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.At bottom of this kind of behavior on the part of old, established writers is the undeniable way in which our young selves, and the books that issued from them, invariably seem to reproach us: with the fading of our fire, the diminishment of our porousness to the world and the people in it, the compromises made, the friendships abandoned, the opportunities squandered, the loss of velocity on our fastball."

- Michael Chabon

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"Pity those—adventurers, adolescents, authors of young adult fiction—who make their way in the borderland between worlds. It is at worst an invisible and at best an inhospitable place. Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who 'don't read fantasy.' Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power."

- Michael Chabon

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"It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights."

- Michael Chabon

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"The imagination of teenagers is often -- I'm tempted to say always -- the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control.During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them."

- Michael Chabon

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"We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness.So we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale.How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!"

- Michael Chabon

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"It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman."

- Michael Chabon

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"I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I’m thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious."

- Michael Chabon

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"The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy."

- Michael Chabon

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"One knew, of course, that it was not the red cape any more than it was the boots, the tights, the trunks, or the trademark “S” that gave Superman the ability to fly. That ability derived from the effects of the rays of our yellow sun on Superman’s alien anatomy, which had evolved under the red sun of Krypton. And yet you had only to tie a towel around your shoulders to feel the strange vibratory pulse of flight stirring in the red sun of your heart."

- Michael Chabon

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"The Weinreichs have laid out, with numerical precision, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish, 250. What is the flight number? 1372. I need something for a tourniquet. 1379. Here is my identification. 254. Can I go by boat/ferry to----?"

- Michael Chabon

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"As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others."

- Michael Chabon

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"[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying—but entirely bogus—rumble of pleasure."

- Michael Chabon

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"Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere."

- Michael Chabon

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"The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for parts that sound true."

- Michael Chabon

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"If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one."

- Michael Chabon

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"I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together."

- Michael Chabon

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"Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car."

- Michael Chabon

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"The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses."

- Michael Chabon

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"I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field..."

- Michael Chabon

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"Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the job as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn't, I might as well have."

- Michael Chabon

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"It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease."

- Michael Chabon

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"A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while."

- Michael Chabon

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"As a lifelong habit of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy..."

- Michael Chabon

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""I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel."

- Michael Chabon

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"I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer."

- Michael Chabon

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"...as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd."

- Michael Chabon

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"Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam."

- Michael Chabon

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"There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal."

- Michael Chabon

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"Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me."

- Michael Chabon

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"The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse."

- Michael Chabon

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"Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy--she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her."

- Michael Chabon

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"He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged."

- Michael Chabon

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"Her ankles were wobbling in her tall black pumps, and I saw that it could not be an easy thing to be a drunken transvestite."

- Michael Chabon

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"The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good."

- Michael Chabon

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"I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home."

- Michael Chabon

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"Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night."

- Michael Chabon

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"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in."

- Michael Chabon

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"Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to."

- Michael Chabon

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"[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation."

- Michael Chabon

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"Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture."

- Michael Chabon

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"[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land."

- Michael Chabon

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"When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other."

- Michael Chabon

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"The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms."

- Michael Chabon

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"“Are you mocking the concept?” “Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”"

- Michael Chabon

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"The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life."

- Michael Chabon

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"A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men."

- Michael Chabon

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"Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor."

- Michael Chabon

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"He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government."

- Michael Chabon

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"Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir."

- Michael Chabon

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"Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve."

- Michael Chabon

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"He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad."

- Michael Chabon

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"He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters."

- Michael Chabon

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"Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself"

- Michael Chabon

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"Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence."

- Michael Chabon

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"A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment."

- Michael Chabon

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"Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength."

- Michael Chabon

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"Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work."

- Michael Chabon

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"He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was."

- Michael Chabon

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"[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret."

- Michael Chabon

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"[L]ook at yourself right now... hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books. … It makes me want to laugh."

- Michael Chabon

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"Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest."

- Wilson Mizner

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"When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Faith is a wonderful thing, but doubt gets you an education."

- Wilson Mizner

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"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet them on the way down."

- Wilson Mizner

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"A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect."

- Wilson Mizner

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"To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady."

- Wilson Mizner

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"...a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat."

- Wilson Mizner

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"It's getting so people no longer count the silverware when I come to dinner."

- Wilson Mizner

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"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Stop dying. Am trying to write a comedy."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Tell 'em to count to ten over him and he'll get up."

- Wilson Mizner

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"I want a priest, a rabbi and a Protestant minister. I want to hedge my bets."

- Wilson Mizner

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"You can't be a rascal for 40 years and then cop a plea the last minute. God keeps better books than that."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Florida was invented for Addison Mizner's little brother."

- Wilson Mizner

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"America's most fascinating outlaw."

- Wilson Mizner

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"That man was so much larger than life that there's no scale by which to measure him. Most of Wilson's dialogue, if put down on paper, seems either vulgar or obscene."

- Wilson Mizner

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"Many people want and need someone to identify with, a man who is self-reliant, stands on his own two feet, and is not afraid to face adversity. They want to believe in me, just as I believed in John Wayne when I was a boy."

- Chuck Norris

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"When you are fighting, good against evil, when the good guys are taking on the bad guys and winning, then I think that’s good … unfortunately in our society, in reality, that’s not always the case."

- Chuck Norris

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"I'm aware of the made up declarations about me that have recently begun to appear on the Internet and in emails as "Chuck Norris facts." I've seen some of them. Some are funny. Some are pretty far out. Being more a student of the Wild West than the wild world of the Internet, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's quite surprising. I do know that boys will be boys, and I neither take offense nor take these things too seriously. Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, "Against All Odds?" They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, "The Justice Riders," released this month. I'm very proud of these literary efforts."

- Chuck Norris

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"I would not want to be a politician... Let me tell you this: If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?"

- Chuck Norris

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"Sometimes the things we want most are the hardest to get. That means you need to be even more determined to succeed. That's what it takes to be a winner. You have to want it bad enough to stick with it no matter how tough things get."

- Chuck Norris

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"I had the opportunity to fly with a Top Gun pilot and land on the USS Nimitz, 240 miles at sea. We landed the F-14 tomcat on the carrier and I was given a tour and was able to shake hands with all the sailors and marines. As we were flying back to Miramar, Maverick (his call name) said to me, “Let’s pretend there is a bogey on our tail.” He immediately went into evasive maneuvers, spinning one way and then the other, hitting up to seven Gs! After about ten minutes, I was about ready to hurl, but I thought, “If I do, he is going to tell all the other Top Gun pilots,” so I said to Maverick in my headset, “Maverick, we lost him!” Maverick laughed and said, “I know what you mean.”"

- Chuck Norris

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"Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth."

- Chuck Norris

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"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."

- Rod Serling

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"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."

- Rod Serling

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"There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

- Rod Serling

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"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

- Rod Serling

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"I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself."

- Rod Serling

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"[T]he ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic."

- Rod Serling

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"If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man."

- Rod Serling

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"I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot — we inhale from our Bartlett's."

- Rod Serling

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"I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive."

- Rod Serling

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"I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest."

- Rod Serling

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"I wish to Christ that I had written a Stagecoach drama starring John Wayne instead."

- Rod Serling

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"[A] medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one."

- Rod Serling

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"From a writing point of view, radio ate up ideas that might have put food on the table for weeks at a future freelancing date. The minute you tie yourself down to a radio or TV station, you write around the clock. You rip out ideas, many of them irreplaceable. They go on and consequently can never go on again. And you've sold them for $50 a week. You can't afford to give away ideas—they're too damn hard to come by. If I had it to do over, I wouldn't staff-write at all. I'd find some other way to support myself while getting a start as a writer."

- Rod Serling

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"Radio, in terms of ... drama, dug its own grave. It had aimed downward, had become cheap and unbelievable, and had willingly settled for second best."

- Rod Serling

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"How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form."

- Rod Serling

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"Hollywood's a great place to live... if you're a grapefruit."

- Rod Serling

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"If you need drugs to be a good writer, you're not a good writer."

- Rod Serling

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"I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped."

- Rod Serling

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"I got the idea for the pilot while walking through an empty lot of a movie studio. There were all the evidences of a community but with no people. I felt at the time a kind of encroaching loneliness, and desolation; a feeling of how nightmarish it would be to wind up in a city with no inhabitants."

- Rod Serling

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"I was dealing with a political story where much of the action took place on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and one of the edicts that came down from the Mt. Sinai of advertisers row was that at no time in a political drama must a speech or a character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. So several million viewers were treated to an incredible display of senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics, saying not a single thing germaine to the current political scene."

- Rod Serling

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"Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the stance of the thinking human being; he does embrace a cause, he does take a position, and can’t allow it to become business as usual. Humanity is our business."

- Rod Serling

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"Once again there appears to be a considerable difference of opinion. I wanted a series with distinction, I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but makes no comment about anything. But all they seem to want is maniacs in a cemetery. When I complain they pat me on the head, condescend, and hope I go away. When I was on the Twilight Zone I took the bows, but I also took the brickbats, because when it was bad it was usually my fault, but when it's bad on the Night Gallery, I had nothing to do with it, yet my face is on it all the time."

- Rod Serling

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"For the first time in television a writer will have the opportunity to let his imagination take him where ever he wants to. The sky is no longer the limit."

- Rod Serling

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"The first sale, that's the one that comes with magic."

- Rod Serling

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"As I get older the urge to write gets less and less; I've pretty much spewed out everything I have to say, none of which has been particularly monumental; nothing that will stand the test of time. Good writing like wine has to age well, and my stuff has been momentarily adequate."

- Rod Serling

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"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

- Rod Serling

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"In his grave, we praise him for his decency - but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own. When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun - we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right. Now we acknowledge his compassion - but we exercised no compassion of our own. When he asked us to understand that men take to the streets out of anguish and hopelessness and a vision of that dream dying, we bought guns and speculated about roving agitators and subversive conspiracies and demanded law and order. We felt anger at the effects, but did little to acknowledge the causes. We extol all the virtues of the man - but we chose not to call them virtues before his death. And now, belatedly, we talk of this man's worth - but the judgement comes late in the day as part of a eulogy when it should have been made a matter of record while he existed as a living force. If we are to lend credence to our mourning, there are acknowledgements that must be made now, albeit belatedly. We must act on the altogether proper assumption that Martin Luther King asked for nothing but that which was his due... He asked only for equality, and it is that which we denied him."

- Rod Serling

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"I'm dedicating my little story to you; doubtless you will be among the very few who will ever read it. It seems war stories aren't very well received at this point. I'm told they're out-dated, untimely and as might be expected - make some unpleasant reading. And, as you have no doubt already perceived, human beings don't like to remember unpleasant things. They gird themselves with the armor of wishful thinking, protect themselves with a shield of impenetrable optimism, and, with a few exceptions, seem to accomplish their "forgetting" quite admirably. But you, my children, I don't want you to be among those who choose to forget. I want you to read my stories and a lot of others like them. I want you to fill your heads with Remarque and Tolstoy and Ernie Pyle. I want you to know what shrapnel, and "88's" and mortar shells and mustard gas mean. I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh, the crippling, numbing sensation of fear, the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complimentary to the province of war and they should be taught and demonstrated in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms, and flags, and honor and patriotism. I have no idea what your generation will be like. In mine we were to enjoy "Peace in our time". A very well meaning gentleman waved his umbrella and shouted those very words...less than a year before the whole world went to war. But this gentleman was suffering the worldly disease of insufferable optimism. He and his fellow humans kept polishing the rose colored glasses when actually they should have taken them off. They were sacrificing reason and reality for a brief and temporal peace of mind, the same peace of mind that many of my contemporaries derive by steadfastly refraining from remembering the war that came before."

- Rod Serling

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"It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name."

- Rod Serling

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"I really can’t claim to being a science-fiction man either. Fantasy was really more my bag. And I’m very much a Johnny-Come-Lately into that. The guys – the really key men – like Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury – they all preceded me by years and years and have a body of literature to show for it. I have nothing but a television show. My only claim is that I put science-fiction and fantasy into a mass media more than any other person."

- Rod Serling

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"Known primarily for his role as the host of television’s The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling had one of the most exceptional and varied careers in television. As a writer, a producer, and for many years a teacher, Serling challenged the medium of television to reach for loftier artistic goals. The winner of more Emmy Awards for dramatic writing than anyone in history, Serling expressed a deep social conscience in nearly everything he did. … Fed up with the difficulties of writing about serious issues on the conservative networks, Serling turned to science fiction and fantasy. Through an ingenious mixture of morality fable and fantasy writing, he was able to circumvent the timidity and conservatism of the television networks and sponsors. Self-producing a series of vignettes that placed average people in extraordinary situations, Serling could investigate the moral and political questions of his time. He found that he could address controversial subjects if they were cloaked in a veil of fantasy, saying “I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”"

- Rod Serling

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"I didn't know him that well, not in social circles. He was a friendly sort and, as a writer, very supportive of his writers on the show. But he always shot my scripts word for word. He seemed to be driven, almost harassed by life. He seemed to reach a plateau in his career, and after a time it all came crashing down. That kind of fame is very difficult to adjust to. Luckily, I've never had that kind of pain or pleasure. For Rod, the Twilight Zone was a success, and yet he was sort of victimized by it. His best work was the Playhouse 90 stuff, the social commentary. The Twilight Zone made him a TV personality, and that kind of fame took its toll."

- Rod Serling

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"I knew Rod and socialized with him also. And, of course, I worked with him, too; we had previously collaborated on some westerns and detective stories. He was really a sweetheart. He was a writer himself, which was extremely unusual back then, for someone who started a series to already be a successful writer. He had had lots of experience with production people, so he understood that he needed to surround himself with the best writers he could get, and then let them do their thing. There wasn’t a line in any of the Twilight Zones that I wrote that wasn’t mine."

- Rod Serling

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"“One thing that we definitely landed on was Serling’s show is important. He is a master of parable. He’s a master of allegory. And what he did was he spoke to society through stories,” said Peele. “This is one of the most powerful weapons that people have against violence and hatred and all the awful things that this world can bring and certainly all the awful things that we have now. There were some things that Serling was simply 50 years too early to talk about.” However, on the flip side of that serious purpose lies a certain slyness. “One of the things that really opened this up for me was to realize that [Serling] is a humorist. We think of him as a horror science fiction master but he has a perfect-pitch tone of comedy… that we were calling the Serling wink.”"

- Rod Serling

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"No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He dreamed of much for us, and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare ...and always irreplaceable."

- Rod Serling

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"I think Rod would have been one of the first to say he hit the new industry, television, at exactly the right time. The first job he got out of school was as continuity writer at (radio station) WLW in Cincinnati. He worked there for over a year before he could free-lance. At that point, he was really working on television scripts. [I]n 1951 and 1952, the new industry was grabbing up a lot of material and needed it. It was a very propitious time to be graduating from school and getting ready to find a profession."

- Rod Serling

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"So I was watching all the Katrina coverage and I got really angry at... Christians who didn't pray hard enough... It's their fucking fault. First off, they needed to pray against the people that were praying for Katrina to hit, because New Orleans is a den of sin and iniquity; an area where gay people dance! But now they have to pray double, and if they had just put that little effort up front, we could've avoided all of this. I think it's time we take a lesson from history, and return to human sacrifice."

- David Cross

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"I thought it was really odd at how much people freaked out at Katrina. You'd think they'd be worried about something important. 'Oh my God, look! George Bush is just appointing all his friends into office and we're in an unfounded war...' But no- 'Fuck that! That nigger's stealing some potato chips!'"

- David Cross

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"I really don't have a problem with gay marriage... because I'm tolerant and rational."

- David Cross

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"[On airport pornography] I've never seen anybody purchase them, but apparently people are. They wouldn't carry them just for aesthetic purposes. They're not trying to impress people with their porn collection, you know. So, it's just a matter of economics...Apparently enough people are goin' in there goin' 'Oh, whoa... All right! The worlds filthiest ball-draining cum-mag! Right on! This ought to make the flight a little more tolerable. Alright. Oh shit! Ha Ha! Page 35: Puckering virgin assholes - alright I gotta get it. Hope nobody is sitting next to me on the plane, because they're in for a rude awakening. Cause I'm gonna be spankin' it!' Ah, it's weird. I'm not knocking porn, I love porn... but when I go to the airport I don't have to buy those magazines, because I have this thing called will power. And I utilize it so that I don't have to whip my dick out in public. I can wait five hours. At least until I'm in the cab on my way home."

- David Cross

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"[On marketing and commercials] HENDERSON VALLEY EGGS! You're gonna love our eggs!!!... [cut to small granny in rockin chair] I like eggs the old fashioned way. [return to youth] "Fuck you granny!" [punch mimic]"

- David Cross

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"I don't remember ordering the Christian sandwich..."

- David Cross

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"If you wanna find out 101 things to do with plums, heh, read your in-flight magazine."

- David Cross

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"[After reading an article on Miles for Kids in an inflight journal] What [President of the Airline] is doing is, he's urging everyone to give up their frequent flyer miles for sick kids... But as I was reading this, there were two empty seats next to me. Why can't sick kids sit there? If they're so concerned with sick kids, shouldn't they have like a pen of sick kids next to the gate?"

- David Cross

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"We get to see it! January 1st, 2000! We get to see... all those fundamentalist preachers having to do their backpedaling when the Armageddon doesn't occur."

- David Cross

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"And then Jesus answered him, Jesus said, 'Well, my son...that is when I was helping one of the other FIVE BILLION PEOPLE on the planet, you selfish fuck. C'mon! You were walking back to your Malibu beach colony home and stubbed your toe on some driftwood, it's not a fuckin' emergency, alright? There's other people with real problems.'"

- David Cross

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"High Times magazine is a notch intellectually below Highlights for Children. I mean, they're both great to read when you're baked, but come on, ya know..."

- David Cross

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"I have a few business ideas (that I'm going to advertise in High Times, amongst other places), and one of them is a service in which I offer to eat and describe pork to kosher people."

- David Cross

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"[With reference to a 'how to date' book] Because you've been on dates where y'know, you forget to open your eyes and wear pants and speak English."

- David Cross

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"[On the Dating Handbook] 'With a telescope, some munchies, and a warm blanket, watch for Halley's comet.' Yeah. I like that. There's no time limit. Just sit there and grow old together."

- David Cross

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"If someone gives you a kazoo and toots around the house to MTV, they're not gonna fuck you."

- David Cross

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"[On death & euthanasia] I think its funny how, that if I want to die with peace and dignity that there's someone far away that can prevent it. Someone's like [strong southern accent] 'Hi, I just wanted to call. This is Jeanette Dunwoody from Valdosta, Georgia. I heard that you're trying to kill yourself and I just wanna say that, well, you can't.' 'What?' 'Yeah, its not right, because all life is precious.' 'No, my life isn't precious, I've been reduced to a shit and piss factory. I hurt always. I'm going to die within a year and I'm in pain constantly.' 'Oh, but um...no. Because of the Bible.' 'Well, I don't believe in the Bible.' 'Well, I do, silly!' [Hangs up]"

- David Cross

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"So at the CES, there was a guy selling off this porno called Fuck My Dirty Shithole: The Movie. I bet you're thinking exactly what I was thinking … how did they make that book into a movie?"

- David Cross

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"James Lipton: The most pompous arrogant failure in history."

- David Cross

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"Radio DJ's are the same two motherfucking asshole clowns all over the country. I hate radio interviews. 'You didn't know it David, but you're just in time for the Friday Morning Fart Song!' No, sorry, I'm not doing that. Even if it's only fifteen minutes, it's the worst fifteen minutes of your life. I don't care if you've been in a fucking shark attack. If I was in a shark attack, and then they had no anesthetic and they had to heal it up, sew it up, I would be like, 'This sucks,' but then if two DJ's came in and interviewed me I'd fucking shoot myself."

- David Cross

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"And the Pope is infallible. We're taught that. Pope can't make a mistake. So I don't know why the Catholic church just doesn't take that motherfucker to Vegas. 'All right, put all the Catholic Church's money on 17 black.' [casino sound] '32 red, I'm sorry.' 'No, I don't think you heard, he said 17 black! Thank you! Let's go to Bellagio!' That way they could pay off those debts they owe."

- David Cross

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"[On the Catholic Church's sex scandals] And y'know, they're God's representatives, so that means... God fucks little boys."

- David Cross

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"Rickey Henderson, pick up the phone, man, it's me... you."

- David Cross

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"It's hip to be square. Remember that shitty song by that shitty band 20 motherfuckin' years ago?"

- David Cross

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"In New York, you are constantly faced with this very urgent decision that you have to make, about every twenty minutes...you have to decide, immediately, you have to go "Ohmigod. Do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world?""

- David Cross

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"The South has more of a disproportionate amount of irony on T-shirts than any other region in the country."

- David Cross

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"[On being Jewish in the American South] All the parents see you as is a Jew; I'm a Jewish kid. I'm like a fucking alien to them, you know, I'm a freak...so If I slept over a friend's house, I'd always have to deal with these questions in the morning, like, you know, Mom coming in going "David, I'm so sorry to have to ask you this, I'm so sorry, um...I'm fixing to make breakfast for everybody and I certainly wanna include you...and I'm just having some questions I was hoping you could answer...do y'alls people eat oatmeal?" What? Yeah. Is there something in the Torah that says we shouldn't eat oatmeal? "No, it's just that I don't know much about y'alls people, that's all, I just don't know--I know y'all hate Jesus! I know y'all hate Jesus, that much I do know...aand, I know y'alls have seven Jew bankers that control the world's money supply, right? In a bunker somewhere about a mile into the earth's core? Is that right? Yeah? And y'all do dances in the woods, y'all wear cloaks and do secret services and burn potions and whatnots, and y'all have horns--that's all I know about y'alls people!""

- David Cross

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"Here's a little what it was like for me growing up in Atlanta... They had this ill-fated thing called 'Light Up Atlanta'. So, I'm standing in line... I tap the guy in front of me and say, "Uh, excuse me, can you tell me if this is the line for the beer, or the line to get the tickets to get the beer.' [long pause] 'I dunno, faggot.' I don't know, faggot? What? What did I do? Was it because I was sucking his cock at the time?"

- David Cross

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"The Bible is the funniest book I have ever read. It's so funny! Right in the first six pages, it's funny!"

- David Cross

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"I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds? Answer: yes."

- David Cross

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"[On the Iraq War] I am against the war, but I do support our white troops. [laughter, long pause] No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a member of the party of inclusion. Wonderful, tolerant, rational human beings they are..."

- David Cross

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"[After having made an abortion joke] I know that can hit close to home for some people....was anyone here aborted?... (mimicking child's voice:) 'I was found in a trash can!' Okay, well, that sorta counts..."

- David Cross

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"So all my friends have kids now... which I think is rude."

- David Cross

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"All my friends are always telling me how hard it is to have kids. 'Oh, David, it's so hard.' That's not hard. I'll tell you what hard is. Try talking your girlfriend into her third consecutive abortion. Yeah, that's hard, that takes finesse. You’re just inconvenienced."

- David Cross

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"Not funny, not funny says she, didn't like it!"

- David Cross

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"I do believe that on a whole, women are definitely smarter than men…I also believe that dogs are smarter than women. (woman in audience says “Not buying that”) No? That one, you don’t believe it? You believe that I didn’t do a series of tests? You are right to not believe it, because I’m going to go ahead and admit that I do not believe what I just said, it was what’s described as a 'joke.' Um, I’ll be telling a bunch of them here tonight."

- David Cross

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"So I was watching this one show where - there's a guy on stage and he pretends he has contact with the dead and spirits talk to him...[Some people in the audience give suggestions, one of which is Crossing Over.] Crossing–...no, no, no, no, no, it was, uh, church. It was church."

- David Cross

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"[On freedom/America] I saw this ad for electric scissors [referring to a bit earlier] during an episode of The Simple Life. Which is a show that glorifies these two rich, giggling cunts, who have no respect for anyone. Just vile people; awful human beings. Who get away with anything, because they're rich. I, right then, vowed that I would retain this image everytime I hear George Bush say 'the terrorists hate our freedom.' You know what? I hate our freedom. Little ol' me, an American! I hate it! That's all we've done with it? We're fucking assholes, man. We...are...awful."

- David Cross

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"If the terrorists hated freedom, the Netherlands would be fucking dust."

- David Cross

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"There's a kind of racism in the south that is really so steadfast and true that I almost kind of begrudgingly, you know, admire it in a way, and that is that there are segregated graveyards. That just to me defies all logic...but it's also, like, "Well, hats off...you're going to stick to your guns on that one, and take that shit to the grave? All right!" There's enough people to go, "Naw, man..ugh, I don't even wanna think about it. My dead, lifeless, rotting, maggot-infested corpse...next to some black man's? Ewww!!! That's gross!" But that does pose an interesting scenario, because, what's going to happen when the zombies rise out of their graves? ... "We must take over the human race-- wait, what were you?" "I'm black." "Fuck you, nigger, you can't come." "What? No! But I'm a skeleton, you can't tell!" "Fuck youuu...""

- David Cross

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"We should just make it a little bit more difficult for people with known violent tendencies to be able to get a gun. And I'm not talking about the cops. No. Not talking about the cops. I'm saying, let's make it a little bit more difficult for mentally unstable people with known violent tendencies to be able to get a gun. And again, I'm not talking about the cops. If you can go on their Facebook page and see that this guy is a virulent racist, right? Make it a little more difficult for virulent racists, who are mentally unstable with known violent tendencies to be able to get-- And again, I'm not talking about the cops."

- David Cross

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"I think we can all agree that Blue Lives Murder. Now... Not all of them, not most of them, but a bunch of em, murder. [scoffs] Theyre murdering us. Well, not us. We're white, but...."

- David Cross

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"You know who doesn't like that bit? Cops. They don't like it. They don't like it. And I think its important -- I'm being sincere. I think its important that we acknowledge, all of us, that there are plenty of good, decent, ethical, very brave cops, who put their lives on the line every day, and they don't appreciate being painted with this broad brush as being violent predators just because of the actions of a minority of their brothers. They don't like being stereotyped so that when you see blue, you just think "Oh, violent thug." They don't appreciate it."

- David Cross

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"Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back."

- Mitch Albom

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"You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you’ve find meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward."

- Mitch Albom

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"When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

- Mitch Albom

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"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

- Mitch Albom

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"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

- Mitch Albom

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"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too - even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling."

- Mitch Albom

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"When you're in bed, you're dead"

- Mitch Albom

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"Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world"

- Mitch Albom

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"Love wins. Love always wins."

- Mitch Albom

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"As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."

- Mitch Albom

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"Love each other or perish."

- Mitch Albom

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"Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone."

- Mitch Albom

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"Don't hang on too long, but don't let go too soon."

- Mitch Albom

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"Without love, we are birds with broken wings."

- Mitch Albom

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"Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?"

- Mitch Albom

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"If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."

- Mitch Albom

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"If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away."

- Mitch Albom

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"What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?"

- Mitch Albom

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"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

- Mitch Albom

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"This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

- Mitch Albom

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"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."

- Mitch Albom

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"How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?"

- Mitch Albom

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"In the stories about life and death, the soul often floats above the goodbye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world. Eddie, it appeared, was not getting a second chance."

- Mitch Albom

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"It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets."

- Mitch Albom

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"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well people often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you the first."

- Mitch Albom

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"Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive." He smiled. "It helps you listen."

- Mitch Albom

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"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

- Mitch Albom

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"People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless."

- Mitch Albom

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"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down."

- Mitch Albom

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"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

- Mitch Albom

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"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to somebody else."

- Mitch Albom

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"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

- Mitch Albom

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"Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation."

- Mitch Albom

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"Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives."

- Mitch Albom

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"Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."

- Mitch Albom

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"Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

- Mitch Albom

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"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

- Mitch Albom

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"Life has to end." Marguerite said. "Love doesn't"

- Mitch Albom

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"All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

- Mitch Albom

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"Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young."

- Mitch Albom

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"It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed."

- Mitch Albom

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"One withers, another grows."

- Mitch Albom

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"Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

- Mitch Albom

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"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

- Mitch Albom

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"That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."

- Mitch Albom

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"You look like my friend Debbie. That's really weird … do you get that a lot? — It's sad, though, 'cause you know, we're not really friends anymore. But, uh, it's not your fault. Seriously, it was 'cause she's, um … not "born again Christian" … oh! — "pathological liar.""

- Sarah Silverman

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"Once I was with two men in one night. But I could never do it again&mdash;I could hardly walk afterward. Two dinners? That's a lot of food."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I got jury duty … and I didn't want to go, so my friend said, "You should write something really really racist on the form when you return it. Like, you should put 'I hate chinks'." And I said, "I'm not going to put that on there just to get out of jury duty. I don't want people to think that about me." So instead I wrote, "I love chinks." And who doesn't?"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I'm so glad Courtney Love is here; I left my crack in my other purse."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I commend you on all you've done for PETA, wrestling the one-eyed trouser snake with your bare hands, gently cuddling it in your arms, and nurturing it back to health."

- Sarah Silverman

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"Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty-six. Nineteen vaginally, but twenty-six what my boyfriend calls "the real way". I always think I should get on it if I want to have kids. Because once you hit thirty it can be difficult to conceive — it can be dangerous. The best time to conceive is when you're a black teenager."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I don't believe in Jesus or God. But I do believe that fundamentalists in religion or anything else are bad, and that they have more hate than love. Jesus' words have become so perverted over time — it's been like a game of telephone. If he existed, Jesus would fuckin' kill himself."

- Sarah Silverman

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"Wow! She is amazing. She is 25 years old and she's already accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in her life. It's mind blowing … have you seen Britney's kids? Oh my god, they are the most adorable mistakes you will ever see! They are as cute as the hairless vagina they came out of!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"This song brings me back … I was brutally raped to this song."

- Sarah Silverman

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"People who call themselves divas...you are not a diva. I'm pretty sure you're a cunt."

- Sarah Silverman

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"Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I'm gonna need a quick answer on this."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I wear this Saint Christopher medal sometimes, because – I'm Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic. It was cute, the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn through my skin, it will protect me. Who cares? Different religions."

- Sarah Silverman

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"The only time it's an issue, I suppose, would be like if you're having a baby and you've got to figure out how you want to raise it. Which still wouldn't be an issue for us, because we'd be … honest, and just say, you know, like, "Mommy is one of the chosen people … and daddy believes that Jesus is magic!""

- Sarah Silverman

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"Jesus is magic, you know, because he turned water to wine, and, um … he, um … I think he made the Statue of Liberty disappear in the 80's."

- Sarah Silverman

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"When that Jesus movie came out, Jews didn't want people to see it. Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it up on the Romans. I am one of the few people that believe it was the blacks!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I don't care. Good! I hope the Jews did kill Christ. I'd do it again! I'd fucking do it again in a second."

- Sarah Silverman

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"People are always introducing me as "Sarah Silverman, Jewish comedienne." I hate that! I wish people would see me for who I really am – I'm white!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin."

- Sarah Silverman

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"The Holocaust would never have happened if black people lived in Germany in the 1930s and 40s … well, it wouldn't have happened to Jews."

- Sarah Silverman

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"The writers of Sanford and Son were so brave in bringing their program to television. I mean, working with all those black people!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I dated a guy who was half-black, but he dumped me because I'm such a loser. Wow, I shouldn't say things like that. I'm such a pessimist … he's actually half-white."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I buy water at the liquor store across the street from where I live. So I'm walking into the door, and standing, loitering, outside the door is a man. And I walk by him to go in, and he says, [in a gruff male voice] "I want pussy!" Now, I don't want to seem conceited or anything, but [flattered smile] he was talking about me!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I've sued my manager for sexual harassment. And it's real hard, and a big strain on me. Because he hasn't done anything."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I was raped by a doctor … which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I saw my father's penis once. But it was okay, because I was so young … and so drunk."

- Sarah Silverman

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"A couple nights ago, I was licking jelly off my boyfriend's penis. And I thought, "Oh my God – I'm turning into my mother!""

- Sarah Silverman

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"I want to get an abortion. But my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving."

- Sarah Silverman

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"On the law that requires women to wait twenty-four hours before they are permitted to have an abortion: I think it's a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty."

- Sarah Silverman

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"When God gives you AIDS – and God does give you AIDS – make lemon-AIDS!"

- Sarah Silverman

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"I love you more than bears love honey, I love you more than Jews love money, I love you more than Asians are good at math. I love you even if it's not hip, I love you more than black guys don't tip, I love you like Puerto Ricans need baths."

- Sarah Silverman

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"Also, I learned whether you are gay, bisexual, it doesn't matter, you know … because, at the end of the day, they're both gross. But mostly, I learned that elderly black women are wise beyond their years … but younger black women are prostitutes."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I learned that people in wheelchairs are allowed to have marathons … which, to me, seems like cheating, but what are you gonna say?"

- Sarah Silverman

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"[holds up an egg] This is AIDS. AIDS is as real as an egg."

- Sarah Silverman

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"If we can send a person to the moon, we can send someone with AIDS to the moon, and then someday we can send everybody with AIDS to the moon."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I'll be back. I'll be black. I'll be white black."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I'll take this opportunity to answer one of the most repeated questions: why didn't I choose to depict Mohammed having sex? The answer is simple. I don't want to get blown up with explosives. I'm afraid of angering Muslims, but not afraid of angering Jews and Christians. So I chose to depict the Judeo-Christian God instead. It seems extremely obvious to me, but so many people asked."

- Sarah Silverman

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"I Hope The Jews Did Kill Christ. I’d Fucking Do It Again in a Second."

- Sarah Silverman

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"It's the first movie I feel really proud of. But I know it's not a movie for everyone. Some people will embrace it, but some people will hate it, and I'm not really sure how to deal with that. In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them."

- Ang Lee

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"Gradually I got tuned into the world — that happens on every movie. I did a women's movie, and I'm not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I'm not gay. I learned as I went along."

- Ang Lee

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"The stern dad stuff doesn't work anymore. You have to be level with the kids, you have to be a nice guy... The authority thing just doesn't work anymore. It's like directing a Chinese film vs. directing an American film. On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy."

- Ang Lee

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"Mainstream films have occupied Hollywood but you can get bored very easily. It can be very repetitive and I think now we want something fresh and something inspiring and different, daring. The mainstream film is very expensive to make and it scares people. It's made for the worldwide audience, you have to please so many people, and the business men start running the movies rather than artists. This is back to the oldest way of Hollywood filmmaking, creating a fantasy, but it has been lost. It seems to take a foreign language film to recoup that ultimate movie viewing experience."

- Ang Lee

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"It was offered to me. When Spielberg says jump, bitches say how high?"

- Matt Damon

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"I mean, I did ride the Paris subway in an attempt to get pick-pocketed in order to see how exactly they did it. My buddy was videoing the whole thing. No one picked my pocket. We got bolder and bolder as we went, but it didn’t pan out for us."

- Matt Damon

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"I think there is really good chance that Sarah Palin could be president and I think that is a scary thing, because I don't know anything about her. I don't think in eight weeks I'm going to know anything about her. I know she was a mayor of a really, really small town, and she is governor of Alaska for less than two years. I just don't understand. I think the pick was made for political purposes, but in terms of governance it is a disaster. You do the actuary tables, you know there is one out of three chance or more that McCain doesn't survive his first term, and it will be President Palin. It really … I was talking about it earlier, it is like a really bad Disney movie, you know. The hockey mom, I'm just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she is the president. She is like facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. You know it is absurd. It is totally absurd, and I don't understand why more people aren't talking about how absurd it is. It is a really terrifying possibility. The fact that we have gotten this far, and with that close this being a reality is crazy. I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That's an important. … I want to know that. I really do. Because she's going to have the nuclear codes, you know. I want to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago or whether she banned books or tried to ban books. I mean, we can't have that."

- Matt Damon

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"My thoughts on veganism are that it’s a wonderful thing to do. I just can’t do it. I tried. Casey Affleck and I made a movie in the desert in Argentina like 12 years ago and he’s a vegan and I tried to eat vegan and I lasted like two days. I just, I literally can’t do it. And I know…that might be bad."

- Matt Damon

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"Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"Four guys could get together and make their own movie, in a year, but nobody does it 'cause they got bills to pay. What I'm saying is, that's what I would do, if I was young. I wouldn't even get a job. I'd get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys, we'd eat crap for a year, millionaires the next year if we did a good film. It's so extraordinary. Instead of crying about getting a job at Disney or "things are falling apart", things the old animators were doing when I was a kid, "it's all crumbling!" It's not crumbling, you're crumbling! You got these computers that could do this stuff for nothing! What do you do with it? You try to get a job for some asshole studio. It's so dumb."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watching me carefully to make sure I was in good taste, I instinctively poured stuff into the picture that I wanted to talk about. But when you force stuff, it's not really very clear. But, I have a great love for Max Fleischer, especially some of his Black & White Betty Boops with their strange Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong black folk tale jazz hipness that part of Cool World was a homage in style to those films and that style of cartooning. The Grim Reaper is right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon or old Terrytoons, which is why I hired and love Milton Knight the artist. He understands totally the Uncle Remus fable like qualities behind Fleischer and Terrytoons. Milton Knight is probably the purest artist of that style in the business. He has a hard time because studios think he is old fashioned...but that's the point."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"Did I have a responsibility to discuss issues? Absolutely. Bobby Dylan was discussing issues – Disney wasn’t."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"Wizards was about the creation of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, about the Jews looking for a homeland, and about the fact that fascism was on the rise again, I thought. That was way before the Right Wing made their appearance again, and I felt that things were shifting back. So on that level, Wizards was a very personal film."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"Sick of Hollywood, tired of fighting and selling out as an artist. I don't believe anyone should do the same thing for the rest of his life. We get a very short time on this planet. Challenging oneself is very important. It's not that I couldn't make other great animated films, but I'd done what I wanted to do, which was make animation an adult medium, if one wanted it to be. And I'd proven to myself that it could work, and it was time to move on to something else. When I sell a painting, I get very excited. I need one person to like what I do, not a million. It's a different structure here. Plus the Hollywood thing. I mean, Hollywood is no place to grow up, no place to live. It's no place to have any friends, no place to enjoy life. It's a disgusting, horrible, craze-driven town. It's only how much do you make, or how fancy a car you have, that determines your status there. And everyone's lying so much that they don't even know they're lying anymore. There's no reality to Hollywood. The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving African... I mean, fuck 'em. I made a few bucks and got out. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with those people. They're disgusting people, and you can quote me on that. There's a lot of great talent there, but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."

- Ralph Bakshi

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"You can only make the slit so much higher, the stiletto so much taller."

- Tom Ford

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"I guess I'm hyper-self-conscious about people thinking that I'm egotistical, but there's a difference between being egotistical and knowing your value as a product and an actor. I know my value as a product, and I've divorced myself as a human from myself as a product."

- Tom Ford

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"... style without substance is nothing, the substance in the story was the most important thing. Of course, there is a layer of style. If I were a director working in a different era, I would have had to be at MGM. I don't think I'd probably know how to make anything but enhanced reality, because that's what comes naturally to me."

- Tom Ford

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"I believe in a parallel universe of image and fantasy that isn't so much fantasy as it is forever sealed in films and things that have entertained us for years. This parallel universe has influenced me perhaps even more than the real world or the physical world. Because when I think of certain things, like a beautiful woman, its most likely someone I saw on film... these are things I've been taking from film or television and applying it to real life."

- Tom Ford

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"He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you.""

- John Irving

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"Imagining something is better than remembering something."

- John Irving

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"Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory."

- John Irving

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"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."

- John Irving

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"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."

- John Irving

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"You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed."

- John Irving

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"Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual."

- John Irving

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"Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"

- John Irving

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"Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!"

- John Irving

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"The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!"

- John Irving

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"But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see."

- John Irving

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"You can't learn everything you need to know legally."

- John Irving

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"Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can."

- John Irving

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"I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse."

- John Irving

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"A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'"

- John Irving

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"Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved."

- John Irving

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"This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people."

- John Irving

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"I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did."

- John Irving

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"Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."

- John Irving

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"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

- John Irving

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"There is no more conspicuous evidence of postsixties confusion than the enormous success, both critical and popular (over 2,500,000 paperback copies in print), of The World According to Garp. Though Garp has its virtues as a novel, I think it owes its status as a phenomenon to its point of view: John Irving attempts to square an emancipated, profeminist stance with a profoundly conservative defense of the family, and because he is such a good storyteller he almost pulls it off."

- John Irving

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"The thing that really breeds career longevity in this profession is doing good work. You can make $20 million a movie, but does that mean you'll still have a job when you're 60? It's a profession that eats people up and wants constant turnaround, so you have to dedicate yourself to learning and making the most of whatever gift you may have."

- Ethan Hawke

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"I've had different opportunities in my life, but I've tried to maintain the spirit of an amateur. Our culture roots everything in the barometer of success and how much money you make. But if you really just aspire to a life in the arts, it's really not a barometer at all."

- Ethan Hawke

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"A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare."

- Ethan Hawke

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"The experience on that movie (Dead Poets Society) was, for lack of a better term, life-altering. Peter Weir has a unique talent for making movies that are intelligent but also mainstream. I've never been terribly successful at doing that."

- Ethan Hawke

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"I never thought that I would be labeled something like Generation X because of that movie (Reality Bites). I had no idea going into it, and it wasn't a label I could relate to."

- Ethan Hawke

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"One of the things that's great about Training Day is that you have two very distinct personalities, but it's true: it also has a great plot. If you can do both, it's incredibly exciting for the audience. Oftentimes, you have art films that have no narrative to speak of and instead offer characterization; then you have mainstream movies that are simple formulas, A-B-C-D. Training Day is a good combo."

- Ethan Hawke

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"People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties, and they don't know real problems... There's something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a really substantive way, of a great modern American novel."

- Ethan Hawke

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"I think what I meant, particularly as a young actor, is that you really struggle with the sense of being undeserving of the attention. And you're right. It happens all the time, there's some new young actor who people are gonna put on the cover of magazines and will talk about, and all you did is say 15 lines in a movie. You know, it's not like you started Greenpeace or something. They don't even put the guys who started Greenpeace on the cover of a magazine... So you understand the sense of fraudulence, and it's attached to yourself, you know? And that's what I was struggling with."

- Ethan Hawke

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"All that stuff with the tabloids is a kind of luxury tax I pay for all the good things I do in my life."

- Ethan Hawke

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"People look at your life and see things as a big deal that aren't a big deal to you. What I mean is, the chapter breaks are different for me. I'll read about my divorce, and what people think about it, and, well, it's so inaccurate, usually, but the fact is, I wouldn't want it to be accurate. Because it's my truth. When I was younger, it was more important to me to come off well. Now, I just want to try to be good at what I do."

- Ethan Hawke

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"...But the truth is, I've never wanted to be a movie star - and I've been pretty clear about that."

- Ethan Hawke

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"Writing the book (The Hottest State) had to do with dropping out of college, and with being an actor. I didn't want my whole life to go by and not do anything but recite lines. I wanted to try making something else. It was definitely the scariest thing I ever did. And a huge learning experience about how not everybody's going to like you, or like what you do. And you have to ask yourself, is it worthwhile? Or am I just doing it to be liked? And it was just one of the best things I ever did. The second book (Ash Wednesday) was so much more fun because of that. The first was just a novelty act, like, 'The kid from Reality Bites wrote a book? Who does he think he is?' And I understand that."

- Ethan Hawke

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"What I love about Celine, what I felt really proud about that script, is that she's really a fully dimensional woman. It's very rare in movies that you don't see a male projection of a fantasy woman. I mean, Julie deserves 90% of the credit, 100% of the credit, but I feel proud of the collaboration that created that character. Her work in that movie is my favorite thing about it."

- Ethan Hawke

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"I was really nervous to read it because I really wanted to like it, you know, 'cause I've had this problem in my life before. I'll get offered something by people I respect and want to work with, but I can't pretend I like it... Hank's just a horrible guy and he's so sad, and he hates himself and he never does the right thing. But I had to admit that it was kind of the challenge I was looking for."

- Ethan Hawke

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"One of the most difficult aspects of being an actor is trying to find the right work. Work that speaks to an audience, that you enjoy doing and that is reflective of your artistic sensibility. To be a contemporary movie actor, you have to kill people - that's basically it. If you don't cock'n'load'n'fire a Smith&Wesson at some point in your film career, you're not going to have a film career. There just aren't enough movies that I like to keep me working in movies all the time. Well, let me rephrase that: there aren't enough available parts."

- Ethan Hawke

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"The older you get, the humbler you get. I know I don't have that much to offer, and I know I've now read Moby Dick and Anna Karenina, and if I had read those books before I wrote The Hottest State, I don't think I'd have published it. I had the arrogance of the uneducated, which sometimes you need."

- Ethan Hawke

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"It's its own form of cinema, it's its own entity. I think Chekhov would like Before Sunset because it's all about nuance. Any decent screen-writing school would throw that script out. There's no beginning, middle and end, it's completely fluid, just chasing the nuance of life, and kind of believing whatever God is lives in this kind of energy that flows between all of us. I kind of live for that, for that chance that you might get another opportunity to be a part of something like that."

- Ethan Hawke

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"In grade school they say you have to pick a profession and stick to it... and people stop looking at their lives as a work in progress. If you don't stay in touch with yourself, you kind of lose focus. If you're going to spend a life in the arts, you need to be infused with a sense of gratitude and a sense of wonder. It's a privilege to do this profession. But there is a payment you have to make for that privilege, which is to do your best all the time."

- Ethan Hawke

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"Seeing the play (A Lie of the Mind) clearly is part of why I wanted to direct it. I see hope at the end of this play. People talk about how dark the play was, but I feel like, if you really look at the darkness, you’re able to go through it, and you realize that you can handle dark moments in life and that everything will be all right."

- Ethan Hawke

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"We live in a funny time. If you don’t go corporate, you can’t compete. You’re relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that. There used to be something badassed and poetic about it."

- Ethan Hawke

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"I don't understand the world. I don't understand why some people have to suffer so much and others don't. I don't understand the unfairness of all that - I can't wrap my brain around it. Seems like it should be the opposite, like global warming should make Haiti discover that they have the secret plant that makes them all rich, because they've suffered enough, those people."

- Ethan Hawke

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"When I was younger I really admired people like Warren Beatty who could do one movie every four years. I thought I could do all that: run a theatre company, write a book, make the occasional movie. But life doesn’t work like that, or at least it only does for one or two people every generation. Usually, there’s a little give and take, you know. It took me a long time to realise that I didn’t understand things as well as I thought I did."

- Ethan Hawke

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"If I say this people will think I'm kidding, but I learned so much about acting working with those wolves on White Fang. If I were to run Juilliard right now, I would make them take a class where they worked with animals. Animals don't know how to lie, so you have to just be with them. Whenever you act weird, or seem like you have an agenda, or are worried about what your hair looks like, they leave the set. They're not interested."

- Ethan Hawke

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"You have to express yourself. And to express yourself, you have to know yourself. It's actually super easy. Just have to follow your love."

- Ethan Hawke

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"We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

- Robert Ardrey

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"Intelligence is no human sideshow but an evolutionary main event. The power to foresee, to call upon the past in terms of the future, to evaluate, to imagine solutions, is a power flowing from old time springs. The human mind may be denied the policeman's privilege of arresting this instinct or that. It may sit as no more than a moderator in the eternal instinctual debate. But it is a moderator with unlimited investigative powers."

- Robert Ardrey

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"Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster’s fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst."

- Robert Ardrey

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"There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone."

- Robert Ardrey

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"Human war ... has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions."

- Robert Ardrey

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"A skepticism concerning what one beholds - whether in the arts, in the sciences, or in the deeply etched channels of fashionable response - contains a force essential to the survival of civilized man."

- Robert Ardrey

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"I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control."

- Robert Ardrey

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"The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it."

- Robert Ardrey

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"Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits - of beauty and of adventure’s embrace - are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?"

- Robert Ardrey

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"Phil Hartman [singing]: I hide behind these wigs and this make-up, but tonight, I'm gonna let myself shine through. They're gonna see the real Phil Hartman, TONIGHT!"

- Phil Hartman

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"[narrating "Sex" by Madonna on tape] I like my vagina. Sometimes I stare at it in the mirror when I'm undressing, and wonder what it would look like without any hair."

- Phil Hartman

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"Your world frightens and confuses me."

- Phil Hartman

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"Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I'm just a Caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW and run off into the hills or whatever. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, did little demons get inside and type it? I don't know. My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts."

- Phil Hartman

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"Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (slurring): [Aboard airplane] Stewardess, could you get me another drink?"

- Phil Hartman

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"Judge: Did you hear that, Mr. Cirroc?"

- Phil Hartman

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"Lionel: Oh no, we've drawn Judge Schneider."

- Phil Hartman

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"Lionel: And as for your case, don't you worry. I've argued in front of every judge in the state. Often as a lawyer."

- Phil Hartman

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Designers from Canada• Murdered people•
"Lionel: I've been getting a lot of calls about you, Marge. People just love your no-pressure approach."

- Phil Hartman

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"Lionel: Well, I didn't win. Here's your pizza."

- Phil Hartman

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"Lionel: Mrs. Simpson, don't you worry. I watched Matlock in a bar last night; the sound wasn't on, but I think I got the gist of it."

- Phil Hartman

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Designers from Canada• Murdered people•
"Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such educational films as Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly and Here Comes the Metric System!. Today I will be your narrator in this sex-ed film called Fuzzy Bunny's Guide to You-Know-What."

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such other nature films as "Earwigs, Ew." and "Man Vs Nature... The Road To Victory"."

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such self help films as "Smoke Yourself Thin!" and "Get Confident, Stupid!"."

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such other medical films as "Mommy, What's On That Man's Face?" and "Alice Doesn't Live Anymore"."

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such educational films as "Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun" and "Firecrackers: The Silent Killer"."

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: Welcome to the Knowledgeum, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such automated information kiosks as "Welcome to Springfield Airport" and "Where's Nordstrom?" While you're enjoying our Hall of Wonders, your car unfortunately will be subject to repeated break-ins and... [Fades]"

- Phil Hartman

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"Troy: I'm actor Troy McClure. You might remember me from such TV series as "Buck Henderson, Union Buster" and "Troy and Company's Summertime Smile Factory". Today I'm here to tell you about "Spiffy.", the 21st century stain remover. Let's meet the inventor, Dr. Nick Riviera."

- Phil Hartman

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Designers from Canada• Murdered people•
"At first you think, 'Gosh, monkeys, that's so kind of incredible … But you started to kind of feel a little bit, not competitive with the monkeys, but that they weren't really — they didn't really have your best interests at heart.They aren't these … They want to replace you. They're not that impressed with the opposable thumbs.'"

- Owen Wilson

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"I just like the themes it's exploring. In the way my character says, "I want us to become brothers again, like we used to be." I really like that line, and it means a lot to me. I just find there's a lot of things like that in this movie that have that feeling. There's stuff that feels exhilarating."

- Owen Wilson

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"Drew Barrymore: Eddie Vedder said something like, "The more you're known as a personality, the less you're accepted as an entertainer." Edward Norton: I would agree with that. On the other hand, I hate the "dark prince" act that some actors put on when they're doing publicity. If it's for real, if you're really a dark prince, then don't sit down with an interviewer and act like a dark prince. I don't necessarily love doing these things, but once you've agreed to do them, I think you ought to get on board."

- Edward Norton

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"An all-too-common reaction to something like racism is to hate the act so much you dismiss the person. But in [American History X] you're forced to confront the complexity of the character and his tragedy - and the fact, which people don't want to recognise, that someone like him can come out of a normal middle-class home."

- Edward Norton

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"My feeling is that it is film, the responsibility of people making films and people making all art to specifically address dysfunctions in the culture. I think that any culture where the art is not reflecting a really dysfunctional component of the culture, is a culture in denial. And i think that's much more intensely dangerous on lots of levels than considered examinations of those dysfunctions throught art is dangerous."

- Edward Norton

• 0 likes• Actors from Boston• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Maryland•
"She said I was afraid of success, which may in fact be true, because I have a feeling that fufilling my potential would really cut into my sittin' around time."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I do wanna get married. It just sounds great. You get to go grocery shopping together, rent videos, and the kissing and the hugging and the kissing and the hugging under the cozy covers. Mmmm! But sometimes I worry that I don't wanna get married as much as I want to get dipped in a vat of warm, rising bread dough. That might feel pretty good, too."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I'm not looking for much [in a guy], I just want, like, a really nice guy who has, you know, like a job... and the missing half of this golden amulet."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"S-s-sure I'll join your cult. [nervous smile]"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"[impersonating her mother] Now, Maria, if a boy doesn't like you, I would just like you to know that he is intimidated by your beauty, because you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world and if you would stop doing impersonations of me I think other people would see that..."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"My old lip color could barely keep up with my busy schedule. In the time it takes to notice the wide discrepancy between my salary and that of my male peers, I'd have to reapply! In the seconds to count the number of women in high political office, seated on corporate executive boards and featured in film and television over the age of 40, my lip color would be as invisible as this glass ceiling only inches above my head! L'Oreal. Because I am worth it. And because holding myself to an impossible standard of beauty keeps me from starting a riot!"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I love my country, but maybe that's because I'm white and rich. I'm not technically rich, but I do have a lot of shit, that I refuse to share with others."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I wish I'd get mad about something that actually, you know, kinda mattered. Go in Target and be like: "You know what? If you can't help me, then I need to speak to someone who can, because this is a three dollar pair of flip-flops made by a 5-year-old Guatemalan girl, and I'm not leaving until she gets benefits and an education under the NAFTA Fair Trade Agreement. You better go get a manager. This could take awhile.""

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I'm not technically rich, but I do have a lot of shit that I don't need, and I refuse to share with others."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"I've never really thought of myself as depressed so much as I am paralyzed by hope."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"[singing the song her therapist told her to improvise in order to "let her anxieties out"] If I keep the kitchen floor clean, no one will die!"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"(singing) Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!/"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"Time flies when you are anxious!"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"There's a lot of mental illness in my family. So, if you catch schizophrenia, get four boxes of Mike and Ikes, a Bible, and a cage. Wait it out."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"[when the bank calls:] "Chase Bank, I'm self-employed, how long do you want to stay on the phone?""

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"Over seven thousand US veterans die of suicide every year, which is funny... [false laughter]... because you'd think they'd die over there, but they come home! Right? I thought that must be funny, because nobody was taking it that seriously."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
""Oh, but I've done some other unforgivable, unspeakable thing"? Google it. There's seven billion of us. Somebody has done exactly what you have done, and is currently on a book tour. You're never alone!"

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"[In response to having being referred to as schizophrenic] Well, that is clearly not my mental illness; I am Bipolar-II — which is the new gladiator sandal! Schizophrenia is, of course, hearing voices— not doing voices."

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"Everything is being televised so you won't be able to tell where the Revolution is. "Who's revolting? Well, I don't know, what's on the other channel?""

- Maria Bamford

• 0 likes• Actresses from Minnesota• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from California• Women born in the 1970s•
"[On the number of victims in the Holocaust] I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Nobody wants to have their name, you know, besmirched on the front of newspapers and people say wicked things about them and their family and call them all sorts of names, accuse them of being anti-Semitic and everything else. I mean that’s not part of my design. I don’t enjoy experiencing that. That’s just coming from some place that I have no control over."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again. … What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?"

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"If you're going to wear three hats, you'd better grow two more heads."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I don't think of myself as either American or Australian really, I'm a true hybrid. It's a good thing for me because both of them are really good countries."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"My family means more to me than the artificial trappings of my career. If ever I had to choose between my career and my family, the wife and kids would definitely come out on top."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I'm not anti-Semitic. My Gospels are not anti-Semitic. I've shown it to many Jews and they're like, it's not anti-Semitic. It's interesting that the people who say it's anti-Semitic say that before they saw the film, and they said the same thing after they saw the film."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I don't feel like I want to get in front of a camera any more. I like getting, you know, just being a slob behind a camera and watching other people look good. You know, I might not hurry back. I might go and go somewhere no-one can find me. You know where that is? You know where the place is no-one can find you? I was thinking of pitching my tent right next to the weapons of mass destruction. Then no-one would find me."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"They take it up the ass. [pointing at his posterior] This is only for taking a shit."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I became an actor despite that. But with this look, who's going to think I'm gay? It would be hard to take me for someone like that. Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?"

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"Hey, I'm for love, not war. How about we have a beer?"

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"The L.A. Times, it's an anti-Christian publication, as is the New York Times."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"There is no salvation for those outside the Church [...] I believe it."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"[On criticism of Catherine Emmerich, the 19th century Augustinian nun whose visions greatly influenced Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ] Why are they calling her a Nazi? ... Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it's a lie. And it's revisionism. And they've been working on that one for a while."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"This is not a Christian versus Jewish thing. '(Jesus) came into the world and it knew him not.' Looking at Christ's crucifixion, I look first at my own culpability in that."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"The only way to maintain a moderate sum of happiness in this life, is not to worry about the future or regret the past too much."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"Fucking Jews... Jews are responsible for all wars in the world."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"What are you looking at, sugartits?"

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the L.A. County sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person. I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said and I apologize to anyone who I have offended. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the deputies involved for my belligerent behavior. They have always been there for me in my community and indeed probably saved me from myself. I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry. I have battled the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse. I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state and have already taken necessary steps to ensure my return to health."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I fully support the efforts of Mr. & Mrs. Schindler to save their daughter, Terri Schiavo, from a cruel starvation. Terri's husband should sign the care of his wife over to her parents so she can be properly cared for."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"You're an embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"Who wants to eat?! Who the fuck wants to eat?! Go have something to eat! Hurrrrraaaaayyyyyy!"

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"I mean, with all this talk of building walls, and stuff like that, I think it's worth remembering that if you look at the servicemen and the military in this country, a lot of them have names like Ramirez and Hernandez and Rodriguez. And just from my reading, it's interesting that many of these men fight and die for their country – and women – and some of them don’t even get their citizenship until after they’re dead. So I think talk of walls and so forth is nonsensical. Hey, it's not the happiest political climate I've ever seen. There doesn't seem to be a very good option for me."

- Mel Gibson

• 0 likes• Actors from New York (state)• Producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Catholics from the United States•
"If you can dance and be free and be embarrassed, you can rule the world."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Donald Trump and producer Mark Burnett are reportedly considering creating a Broadway musical based on The Apprentice. The pair came up with the idea when neither one of them could find a match to set fire to a pile of money."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Britney Spears is recording a rap song about the recent controversies in her life. "I can't wait to hear that!", said no one."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"In a recent Valentine's Day posting on her fan website, Britney Spears says that...oh, who cares?"

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"A chimpanzee in China has quit smoking after 16 years, with the help of her keepers. The chimp was able to quit when the keepers STOPPED BUYING HER CIGARETTES!"

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"A 14-year-old Indiana girl was arrested after she came to a middle school with a handgun, ammunition, and six small bags of marijuana. Man, Dakota Fanning's growing up so fast!"

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Christian conservatives are claiming that the hit documentary March of the Penguins supports the theory of intelligent design. Meanwhile, backers of evolution claim that intelligent design is refuted in the documentary March of the Bonaduces."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise trip to Iraq Sunday. Also surprised to be in Iraq on Sunday: thousands of U.S. troops who were supposed to be home by Christmas."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"According to a new survey, 67 percent of teenagers are content or extremely happy most of the time. They're called stoners!"

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"This week, Donald Trump introduced a new twelve-inch doll of himself that speaks seventeen different phrases, which is amazing, as that's five more than the real Donald Trump."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"(Picture of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones appear) This week, the California Raisins announced plans for a new world tour."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"(On the 2006 US Midterm Elections) This week, in an ironic turn of events, Iraq brought regime change to the United States."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"(In reference to the Pamela Anderson/Kid Rock divorce) It was announced this week that these will no longer be bouncing on that."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"A woman's nether regions should always be shrouded in mystery."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Surprising news from New York, the whistle-blower had his whistle blown!"

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"An orca trainer almost drowned after its orca dragged him down in the tank. He did reveal the locations of three Al-Qaeda hideouts."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I’ve grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let’s peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write."

- Amy Poehler

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Autobiographers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I've been learning a lot about myself from reading about all the stuff I've been up to, not based on any form of truth. I lead a pretty boring life — I sit at home, I'm on the Internet, I eat cereal — that's a typical night for me. I read online about all the places I've been out partying and all the women I've been out partying with. I'm like, "Wow, I should probably go to that place. It sounds like fun. It sounds like I had a good time there." I'm kind of jealous of the life I'm supposedly leading."

- Zach Braff

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Comedians from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. Whether it's going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. (I was) enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Environmentalists from the United States•
"There's no other art form in the world that affects me more."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Environmentalists from the United States•
"I like my name. My parents were in the Uffizi Gallery looking at a Leonardo Da Vinci when my mom felt me kick. That's how I got my name. My parents were real hippies."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Environmentalists from the United States•
"Drugs? Every one has a choice and I choose not to do drugs."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Environmentalists from the United States•
"With Romeo and Juliet, you're talking about two people who meet one night, and get married the same night. I believe in love at first sight-but it hasn't happened to me yet."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Environmentalists from the United States•
"I'm absolutely clean. I've never tried anything. That's not a lie!."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I'm not the sort of person who tries to be cool or trendy. I'm definitely an individual."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I don't have emotions about a lot of things. I rarely get angry, I rarely cry. I guess I do get excited a lot, but I don't get sad and enormously happy."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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""You learn after a while that it's not getting your face recognised that's the payoff. It's having your film remembered."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I hate speaking in front of a large audience. I don't know where it came from...but its just this gut-wrenching fear of slipping up and doing something horrible."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I’ve always kind of made sure to maintain the sense of who I am and never be mean or cruel or snotty to anyone. Because, at the end of the day, it's not going to help you last in the business, and who wants to be around someone like that? I don't want to turn into ‘that guy.’ That guy!"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"My God, no! I hate this whole hunk thing! I feel when I see myself in that, and these other cute faces, that I'm just part of this meat factory, like, 'Wow! Here's the hunk of the month! This month we're shoving Leonardo DiCaprio down your throat! Isn't he cute. Let's put him on the cover and we'll sell so many more magazines...' That's definitely not what I want to be, and I've tried real hard to get away from that whole situation."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"If you can do what you do best and be happy, you're further along in life than most people."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"The main thing for me right now is just to live my life with my family and friends. They treat me like Leo, not 'Leonardo, Master Thespian'. That's all I need to keep my sanity."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"The last thing I want to turn into is a fat Hollywood jerk. I was brought up without much money and I was happy. I don't think that I will strive for money or success and end up greedy or big-headed. That only leads to unhappiness. I can still be down-to-earth and do this job as long as I enjoy it."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Don't think for a moment that I'm really like any of the characters I play. That's why it's called acting."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"It was pretty disheartening to be objectified like that. I wanted to stop acting for a little bit. But it changed my life in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I can't say that it didn't give me opportunities. It made me, for the first time, in control of my career. - On Titanic (1997)"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"One of my passions is to meet people and then imitate them. I love doing that."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I have the same problem as Edward Furlong. I'm so thin!"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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""I was behind a woman at the checkout counter who was looking at the magazines. She turned to me and goes, 'There he is again, that Leonardo DiCaprio. Don't you wish he'd just disappear?' I said, this is the moment where I either go, 'Do you know who I am?' or put my hat further down, pay for my corn-nuts and get out of there....I choose to avoid that. (2005)"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I remember the casting session that I had where I was a break dancer, having this punk hair cut. They rejected me and I became really disillusioned with the business and said well this is what it's all about, and I haven't even got in to read a line. He said don't worry, some day we're going to get you back into this and it's going to happen for you, which I kind of took to heart. It was one of those situations where I was lucky and fortunate enough to be at the right places at the right time. All of a sudden I was on the set of Growing Pains and got this audition for This Boy's Life and was able to jump into the feature film world. It's really been just simply the fact that I'd been able to work, you know what I mean? I would probably still be trying to be an actor even if I was out of work, but I would probably become a little disillusioned at some point and move on to other things. But it's the one thing that I know that I love."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I'm shy, but when the time comes to be wild, I'm fun-loving, adventurous, and mysterious."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On his career: "I admit I've done a few lousy roles in the beginning of my career, like my role in Critters 3 (1991). But at that age, you'll do anything for attention!"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"All I know is that when you make a movie it's something you have to live with forever. It's not a job I take lightly."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"And I love doing what I'm doing and I'd get out of it if I hated it that much. I've said it many times before: There are much worse problems in the world, people dealing with things that are phenomenally more complicated."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was five years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It's evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That's something I never wanted. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we'd go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"When I was young, I used to have this thing where I wanted to see everything. I used to think, 'How can I die without seeing every inch of this world?'"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I don't have the guts that Romeo did. [on marriage]"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Dark green is my favorite color. It's the color of nature and the color of money and the color of moss!"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Certainly after Titanic, where my face was put on every magazine cover around the world and the movie was such a phenomenon, I really had no control over that. So for the last couple of years, media-wise I've been trying to regain some control in what people say about me."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"The challenge is to understand the psyche of somebody like that. There is no true genius or revolutionary ideas, I don’t think, without some element of compulsiveness or madness or obsession, and that’s certainly indicative of Howard Hughes. Understanding his obsessive-compulsive disorder was really the key for me for opening up who this man was."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I think it’s a real danger, as an actor, when you try to make some statement through your career about what the business should be doing or ultimately what your image should be or how you want to be perceived. I look at every project that comes along and say, “Is this something I can sink my teeth into and can do a good job on?” That’s really how I choose roles."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"As a little kid growing up in Hollywood, I was called 'a little crazy'. And now I guess I'm still that way."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"The fact that Romeo is dopey, lovey-dovey, and it's a corny story. And I was afraid I'd look like a fuffy."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"A lot of actors ask me “what do you do? How do you get into the business?” My only answer is don’t be discouraged. … You have to commit your life to it, almost, and never give up. It’s a cliché, but it’s true."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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""I wasn't surprised that Jamie got the award. But I knew that cameras would be stuffed up my face so I had my response ready. Anyone who says they don't practice is a liar." -on losing out on the Oscar to Jamie Foxx during the 2005 Academy Awards."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On turning 30: "I kind of feel like the same person except more time has gone by. I hate to say that I feel like an adult now. I have to admit I wish I was still 18. After all, even through the time while I was representing that wild kid, I really wasn't. I was just living my life. I was just not making movies at the time."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On Martin Scorsese: Martin has brought so much to the art form of film, and he is not the type of person who would be upset by not receiving an Oscar, although it is a practical joke that he has not won an Academy Award after all these years. Whatever opinions critics will have of The Aviator, I really think that this is a great piece of art: once again, he has made a great classic film."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I like to help the whales, the otters, and the dolphins. When I`m acting and I take a break, the first thing on my list is spending time by the sea."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to - until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"As an actor, you're constantly searching for that great character. Also, being a history buff and learning about people in our past and amazing things that they've done, I came across a book about Howard Hughes and he was set up as basically, the most multi-dimensional character I could ever come across. Often, people have tried to define him in biographies, but no one seems to be able to categorize him."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On rumors: I've heard some pretty bad rumors...that I'm gay. If I want to go to a party with a few male friends, it doesn't mean that I'm gay. I don't see why I can't have friends of both sexes without rumors being spread about me. It's crazy."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"If you hear of any incident about me - a fight, a change of clothes, a little extra gel in the hair, don't believe it till you talk to me."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Well it's a risk to do a movie of this calibre on a subject matter and a point in history people are not very familiar with. It's a tough subject to sell - so salary-wise you have to make sacrifices to make a certain film happen. I would have been an idiot to pass up the opportunity to work with Mr Scorsese."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I’ve been in the business since I was 16, so I’ve had a 14-year career. I’ve always had acting in my blood. Doing this, whatever it is, was something I was drawn to since my earliest memories. Ironically, I lived in Hollywood, but never understood that all it took was getting an agent and being persistent."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On whether there are any aspects of fame he dislikes: You kidding? I feel very fortunate. A lot of people would love to be in my position. There are so many people out there who are suffering trillions of times more than I could ever suffer, and would love to be me. I am a lucky little bastard."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Everywhere I go, somebody is staring at me. I don`t know if people are staring because they recognize me or because they think I`m a weirdo."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I'm probably not going to get married unless I live with somebody for 10 or 20 years. But these people (Romeo and Juliet) took a chance and they did it. We don't have the balls that Romeo did."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. It`s a great outlet. As for myself, I`m not sure who I am. It seems that I change every day."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Being dubbed as a hunk sort of annoys me. It gives me a yucky feeling."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I prefer ordinary girls - you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with a girl, it doesn't mean we are dating."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"On working with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York (2002): "He's a perfectionist, obsessed with detail. That's why he went over budget and over schedule."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I don't really have many extravagances. I don't fly private jets and I don't have bodyguards and I don't buy crazy things. I have a couple of houses here and there. I bought a very expensive watch, and I am going to buy a really expensive movie poster, the original for The Thief of Bagdad (1940). I love movie posters."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"A consensus has emerged in our scientific community that global warming is no longer merely a theory but a reality, a crisis with truly global implications for planet Earth and all of us who share it. - Told to thousands at the New Jersey concert for Live Earth"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"There are pros and cons to everything. To be able to do what I do and what I love on this level is a very positive thing. There are certain invasions of privacy, but I hate sitting around complaining about it, I just don't like to hear it come out of my mouth. I'm a very fortunate person being able to do what I do."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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""People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Brothers don`t necessarily have to say anything to each other-they can sit in a room and be together and just be completely comfortable with each other."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Love at first sight? I absolutely believe in it! You`ve got to keep the faith. Who doesn`t like the idea that you could see someone tomorrow and she could be the love of your life? It`s very romantic."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"Yes, I can play younger than my age. But I can play characters older than I am, too. I`m not an actor who can just play the kid."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"People always like to make up stories. I am not planning on getting married. Then again, I might wake up tomorrow and decide to get married!"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I insist on keeping a level head. I`ve maintained the same exact home life that I`ve had for 20 years. All I see is more people looking at me than before. But, you know, who cares? You just can`t obsess yourself with this fame stuff."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"I've been very lucky to have achieved a lot of the things that I dreamt of achieving as a young man. But, at the end of the day – and I truly believe this – it is not about achieving great wealth or success. Because they don't bring happiness ultimately. They really don't. What matters is whether or not you've fulfilled the idea of having led an interesting life, whether you've contributed in some way to the world around you."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"As an Academy member, you're not allowed to endorse somebody else when they're up for an Academy Award and if you do, there's a good chance you'll lose your membership. But I have to tell you Leo DiCaprio is so amazing in The Revenant"

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"We were peers, I think. Leo's an incredibly intelligent guy who's been through a great amount of life experience over the course of the last few years. He's very dedicated and I think he had a very good idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"He reminds me of that excitement when De Niro and I stumbled upon a way of working together - a similar kind of energy to the actors in the 1970s. It’s very rare for me to find that kind of connection again. Leo will give me the emotion where I least expect it and could only hope for it about three or four scenes. And he can do it take after take.""

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"You know, I worked with Leonardo when he was 18 [on The Quick and the Dead]. He was a virgin, and he would talk about that constantly. So I'm hoping we have some time so he can fill in what's happened in between. Maybe show some photos. Because I'm sure life's different now."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"DiCaprio is both a famous actor and perhaps the world’s best-known climate activist. He doesn’t speak on the subject of carbon emissions so much as he preaches. “Humans have put our entire existence into jeopardy,” DiCaprio thunders. Climate change is “the most urgent threat facing our entire species.” Those who question climate policy, he declares, should be banned from public office. “The scientific consensus is in, and the argument is now over.” Few preachers live up to the standards they set from the pulpit, and DiCaprio is no exception. In the summer of 2016, DiCaprio was scheduled to receive an award from the environmental group Riverkeeper. He was in Cannes attending the film festival at the time, so he chartered a private jet to fly from France to New York and back. That’s an eight-thousand-mile round-trip, which in addition to being physically exhausting, amounts to a gargantuan carbon footprint, bigger than the average African might emit in a lifetime. For DiCaprio, it was just another Cannes Film Festival. The year before, he was photographed off the coast of France meandering alone on the deck of a 450-foot, $200 million yacht, which he’d rented as an accommodation for the week. Once again, a lot of carbon."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"His two eyes are different," says Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Leo in what may be his best movie, What's Eating Gilbert Grape. "The left eye is very soft and empathetic. The right eye is more analyzing. One eye oozes warmth, while the other is more penetrating. One eye is psyche, the other is intellect."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"He's probably the world's most beautiful-looking man, yet he doesn't think that he's gorgeous. And to me, he's just smelly, farty Leo."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"With those eyes and his intellect, I see no real limit to his potential."

- Leonardo DiCaprio

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"It would be ridiculous for me to say anything negative regarding blacks having an equal opportunity on TV. After all, I was number one in the ratings four times last year and twice this season. What could be more damn equal than that? If they get any more equal, I don't want it."

- Flip Wilson

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"Once in one's life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived"

- Sylvester Stallone

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"Remember the mind is your best muscle ...BIG ARMS can move rocks, but BIG WORDS can move mountains... Ride the brain train for success...."

- Sylvester Stallone

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"The films are realistic fantasies. Bullets are easy. You can buy them. Emotions are not. They're priceless."

- Sylvester Stallone

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"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

- Sylvester Stallone

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"I have Bright's disease and he has mine."

- S. J. Perelman

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""Great-grandfather died under strange circumstances. He opened a vein in his bath." "I never knew baths had veins," protested Gabrilowitsch." "I never knew his great-grandfather had a ba—" began Falcovsky derisively."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Oh, son, I wish you hadn’t become a scenario writer!" she sniffled. "Aw, now, Moms," I comforted her, "it’s no worse than playing the piano in a call house."

- S. J. Perelman

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"The worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah in Hollywood. He is shunned by his friends, thrown into bankruptcy, and like a Japanese electing hara-kiri, he commits suttee."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called "a conference"."

- S. J. Perelman

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"I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws."

- S. J. Perelman

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"In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero’s shoulders and the heroine’s balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflicted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Before they made S J Perelman they broke the mold."

- S. J. Perelman

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"[The waiters'] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck."

- S. J. Perelman

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"The main obligation is to amuse yourself."

- S. J. Perelman

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"Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy."

- S. J. Perelman

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"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it."

- S. J. Perelman

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"You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father, and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older."

- Lillian Gish

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"I don't feel I'm old. I just feel I'm me. And I've always been a happy person. I love the human race. I love my work. I love the world—I've been around it four times, you know. And I'm a believing person. I believe in God, even though I can't see him. You can't see the air in this room, right? But take it away and you're dead. And I believe there's something for us after we die. The world isn't wasteful. It keeps going on and I think we do too."

- Lillian Gish

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"If you're caught acting, nobody believes you."

- Lillian Gish

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"When I was in films, we pretended to kiss but we didn't. It was considered unsanitary. Now they swallow each others' tonsils. It's disgusting."

- Lillian Gish

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"I never chose money, I always chose people. I wanted to be around people who knew more than I did. I think that’s why I never fell in love with an actor. They never seemed to know any more than I did. I wanted to be with writers… My idea of a dream man was Thornton Wilder."

- Lillian Gish

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"I'm so glad I didn't ruin a man's life by marrying him."

- Lillian Gish

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"Thalberg wanted commercial hits. I wanted art."

- Lillian Gish

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"According to director Lindsay Anderson, one day while filming The Whales of August he said to Lillian Gish, "Miss Gish, you have just given me a perfect close-up." Bette Davis remarked: "She should. She invented 'em.""

- Lillian Gish

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"Lillian Gish is not only the best actress in her profession, but has the best mind of any woman I have ever met."

- Lillian Gish

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"For Lillian Gish, My Favorite Actress. On the occasion of her 1st visit to New York of which this book is a practical guide. From Her Chattel, F. Scott Fitzgerald"

- Lillian Gish

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"I never cease to wonder at my luck in having for my sister the woman who, more than any other woman in America, possesses all the qualities of true greatness."

- Lillian Gish

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"The Cobweb was just plain weird, but I got to know and admire Miss Lillian Gish."

- Lillian Gish

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"There was a civil war in this country... Kennedy provoked such hostility and hatred. His death was cheered in the South because of his support for Martin Luther King. He was moving to change things on all fronts. He was starting to end the Cold War. He made a deal with Khruschev and Russia in 1962 to end the missile crisis, and he furthered the... Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. He... described the Soviets for the first time in American history as mortals, like us, who care about their children. He seemed to have an expanding vision of the world, much like Gorbachev did in Russia in the '80s."

- Oliver Stone

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"Since that day, the media has chanted the mantra that Oswald did it alone. But the American public... has never accepted it. They smell a rat."

- Oliver Stone

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"My father was a Republican and he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture and we would never fit in there."

- Oliver Stone

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"[In comparison with the Vietnam war] It's the same story in Afghanistan, Iraq and South America. It's white people meeting people who they think they are better than. And I feel that this war is the war of my life. I've seen it over and over again and if I can do one thing with what's left of my remaining years, it's just to cry it out and say it, I hope, with enough entertainment that people will want see it."

- Oliver Stone

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"We have an obligation to those who died ... to remember"

- Oliver Stone

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"A sad occasion in that Julian could not follow me out the door. He lives in a tiny room with great modesty and discipline."

- Oliver Stone

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"Strong mind, no sun, friends who visit, work to be done, one documentary coming out from Alex Gibney that is not expected to be kind."

- Oliver Stone

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"Another film from Dreamworks which is also going to be unfriendly … I don't think most people in the US realise how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support."

- Oliver Stone

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"Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept."

- Oliver Stone

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"The most shocking part [about the assassination of JFK] is...the sequence of the shooting, the timing,... the wounds and the autopsy. It’s all quite shocking when you...think seriously about it. It doesn’t make any sense the way they described it. That’s the most shocking part of the case. When you start to investigate Oswald, of course there are a thousand interesting things that come up. The files on Oswald were much more closely supervised by the CIA then we knew at the time and were omitted by the Warren Commission. They treated it like a routine investigation, but it was hardly so. We draw a line between the cover-up and the assassination. The cover-up is filled with another cast of characters. That is to say, the Warren Commission itself, who is in charge of the investigation; and the main man, Alan Dulles, the ex-chief of the CIA and one of the most powerful figures in government. He was fired by Kennedy, as were all his top officials, two years earlier. He was put in charge of the investigation and buried certain information. That’s part of the cover-up."

- Oliver Stone

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"Fidel Castro was a brilliant person who predicted everything that has happened in the world since 2001... I made the film Comandante with the idea that it would be a historical profile of the man. The film can be seen on YouTube, but it could never be screened in theaters in the United States because they censored it and removed it a week before it was due for release...Then we made Looking for Fidel, which was possibly the most aggressive interview with Fidel. I asked him very difficult questions and that movie was screened on HBO. However, given the good job that Fidel did answering the questions they do not put it on enough on U.S. television. HBO instructed me to ask Fidel hard, tough questions, to put him on the spot. As you all know, that was not easily done and he was brilliant in his answers to all my questions. I think that’s why HBO has not shown the movie again."

- Oliver Stone

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"Putin is the most mature statesmen in the whole world right now. He's been there for four American presidents, since Clinton...He's been everywhere, met everybody. And he sees the world as needing balance. It's not a uni-polar world, dominated by the United States... He's been very clear that we need balances of regional power. Unfortunately, the United States just doesn't want to believe that...it's our military side that scares the sh-- out of me,.. as we tend to be arrogant, that's when you become very dangerous. Somehow we have to learn that we don't have to be number one. We can be partners with the world."

- Oliver Stone

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"In all my public statements, I was not at all in favor of anything he [G.W. Bush] did. He was a disaster for the country in his reaction to 9/11...Worst president we've ever had... To say that Trump is similar is ridiculous because it trivializes the situation.... He's got enough nutcases around him between Bolton and Pompeo that I would worry very, very much... You've got to look back at George Bush... and understand what a mess he put us into. We have not gotten out of Iraq. We have not gotten out of Afghanistan. We have not gotten out of the War on Terror... which is the greatest fiction since the Cold War back in 1945."

- Oliver Stone

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"In January 2018, the experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight, where it had stood during the darkest days of the Cold War, from 1953 to 1960. The latest move of the hands was precipitated by the recklessness in Trump’s nuclear thinking and the deepening crisis over Korea. Trump wondered aloud about the point of having nuclear weapons if he couldn’t use them."

- Oliver Stone

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"Acting like a hegemon, the United States, starting in 1999, took advantage of Russian weakness and broke its promise not to expand NATO, eventually adding 13 countries, the last of which was Montenegro, in 2017. When Bush announced plans to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine, Putin drew the line. Following the US-backed Ukrainian coup, he took back Crimea and made clear that there are limits to his toleration of NATO expansion..."

- Oliver Stone

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"But now, in March 2018, Putin was declaring that the US effort had failed. He unveiled the existence of five new nuclear weapons, all of which could circumvent US missile-defense systems. He concluded defiantly, "I hope everything that has been said today will sober any potential aggressor," adding, "No one listened to us. Listen to us now.""

- Oliver Stone

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"In the movie the main speaker – heavyweight Ukrainian politician, opposition leader –Viktor Medvedchuk is being interviewed by the renowned filmmaker Oliver Stone... also sat with Russian president Vladimir Putin to ask him a questions about Ukrainian crisis. They share their thoughts on the reasons for the conflict and ways to solve it. The audience will be guided through a behind the stages of the real “games of power” in a way that they can’t see in any mainstream mass media."

- Oliver Stone

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"Oliver Stone, an American writer and an Oscar winning filmmaker will present his documentary about Ukraine [Revealing Ukraine] at the 65th Taormina Film Festival... in Sicily on June 30 - July 6. ... The documentary... reveals the details of the 2014 uprising in Ukraine, discloses the connection between interference to the recent presidential elections in the U.S. and Ukraine, casts the light into the current situation with the conflict in Donbas."

- Oliver Stone

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"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the "most warlike nation in the history of the world." Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered."

- Oliver Stone

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"As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it "is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen." Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, "Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere." In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

- Oliver Stone

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"[On his documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (2021)] As one of our interviewers, David Talbot, says in the film, once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal and say, "Oh, wow! We found this whacky--this crazy lone nut who killed him." It doesn't work. It doesn't really work as a narrative for this country. What happened was much deeper than that, and there was so many inconsistencies, so many holes in the Warren Commission... The point is that you cannot remove legitimacy from government like that and get away with it, and the people knew something was wrong. They didn't know exactly what was wrong, but they sensed that something had gone astray, like anarchy has set in. Some method of control was being exerted because forces that were more powerful than one person were able to kill him, forces that were somewhat, I mean, clearly related to intelligence agencies, to possible military agencies, and these forces came to dominate American life..."

- Oliver Stone

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"After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting."

- Oliver Stone

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"There's been a campaign, a war against Russia going on for a long time. It started again in the United States around 2006... there's no evidence really of the aggressiveness of Russia. The aggressiveness is truly coming from the NATO forces that have encircled Russia and that are also, by the way, encircling China. You know, this is a big policy point, huge, of huge importance... we have to have people in the United States who speak up for the peace point of view... Let's get along with China. Let's get along with Russia, Iran, and so forth. We have to change our point of view because we are seeking to still be the only power in the world that is in control of the world. We cannot continue on this path; it's a suicidal path. And I think many Americans agree with me, but it's never been allowed to be stated politically. People who say this type of stuff never win elections because they're ridiculed or marginalized in the press, to be honest."

- Oliver Stone

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"The Warren commission (into Kennedy’s assassination) was a sham. They (meaning the intelligence agencies) appointed it. Lyndon Johnson basically didn't want problems because he says he feared war with Russia over Cuba. That was his excuse. But if he’d really looked at the case, if he had had proper intelligence agencies working with him, he (would have known) that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with this assassination. Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy wrote to (Russian president) Khrushchev saying, "We know it’s not you; we know it’s a right-wing plot from our own country." And that's what it was."

- Oliver Stone

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"He [JKF] is one of the most important presidents because he was for peace at a time when we were on the brink of war. In 1960, when he ran, the Pentagon was ready to take out Russia on the first strike. This was what their thinking was: "We gotta nail these bastards now" ... That was their Dr Strangelove thinking. Johnson put us right back smack into the middle of the biggest war we'd ever had since WWII and it was a disaster, as you know. A debacle."

- Oliver Stone

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"Putin is a great leader for his country and the people love him."

- Oliver Stone

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"Movie critics have complained that the movie lacks coherent vision. The fault may not be Stone's. We know what Alexander] did, and it continues to astonish us, but we don't know how or why he did it... Stone suggests some noble purpose for Alexander's mad, bloody tromp across Asia. He and his historical consultant shared a need to give meaning to a meaningless conquest."

- Oliver Stone

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"In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: "Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat?" These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post-World War II development of the United States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."

- Oliver Stone

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"Animal rights acitivists always say to me, "How could you kill a chicken for a movie?" Well, I eat chicken and I know the chicken didn't land on my plate from a heart attack. We bought the chicken from a farmer who advertised freshly killed chicken. I think we made the chicken's life better. It got to be in a movie, it got fucked, and then right after filming the next take, the cast ate the chicken!"

- John Waters

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"Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?"

- John Waters

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"To me, camp is two older queens talking about Rita Hayworth under a Tiffany's lampshade."

- John Waters

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"I've always tried to push things to the limit, but when I started, the censors to be feared were old, conservative, religious men, whereas today the censors are young, rich, liberal men who seem to be against the freedom of expression I fought for. [...] people should be able to have an opinion they don't agree with and still be friends, have a dialogue, or argue about it."

- John Waters

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"We're husky, we're hairy, we're homosexual, and out of the second closet."

- John Waters

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"And we can cuddle all night!"

- John Waters

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"To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste."

- John Waters

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"To understand bad taste one must have very good taste."

- John Waters

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"I would never want to film hard-core pornography, because it always looks like open-heart surgery to me."

- John Waters

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"[I] pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value."

- John Waters

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""How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder."

- John Waters

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"Life is nothing without a good sense of humor."

- John Waters

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"I'll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it."

- John Waters

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"Parents should worry if their children haven't been arrested by the time they turn sixteen. Being a juvenile delinquent is a birthright and as much a part of healthy adolescence as smoking cigarettes or getting pimples."

- John Waters

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"I'd never trust anyone who hadn't spent at least one night of his youth in the local jail. The more hell you raise as a teen-ager, the sweeter your memories will be."

- John Waters

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"I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore... It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay. No one moves here."

- John Waters

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"I stopped taking drugs when I realized that pot smelled bad and LSD trips were becoming like TV reruns. I had had enough inner journeys &mdash; I felt I knew myself well enough, thank you."

- John Waters

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"All people look better under arrest."

- John Waters

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"Going to a sensational murder trial is the only way I can relax."

- John Waters

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"Cheer up. You never know &mdash; maybe something awful will happen tomorrow."

- John Waters

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"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

- John Waters

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"We watched everything...A family favorite was Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp. Whenever the John Waters film broke out in song, we would all scream and start singing, too."

- John Waters

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"Waters might, once upon a time, have been a candidate to be the American Buñuel, especially when he had the raw hatred of Divine under his command..."

- John Waters

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"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."

- Stirling Silliphant

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"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."

- Stirling Silliphant

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"I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure."

- Michael Malone

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"There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace."

- Michael Malone

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"As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia."

- Michael Malone

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"Will you accept three hundred dollars per week to work for Paramount? All Expenses paid. The Three Hundred is Peanuts, millions are to be grabbed out here and your only comepetition is idiots. Don't let this get around."

- Herman J. Mankiewicz

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"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."

- Herman J. Mankiewicz

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"Never care what anybody says."

- Herman J. Mankiewicz

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"I don't know how it is that you start working at something you don't like, and before you know it you're an old man."

- Herman J. Mankiewicz

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"I look at Hank and he nods and I nod and for a brief second I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going."

- James Frey

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"More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to be close to someone. More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to feel as if I wasn't alone."

- James Frey

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"I don't believe she's in Heaven and I don't believe she's in a better place. She's dead and when we're dead, we're gone. There are no blinding lights, there is no happy music, there are no angels waiting to greet us. St. Peter is not at the Pearly Gates with a big fat fucking book, our friends and Relatives are not holding a seat for us at a divine dinner table, we do not get a tour of Heaven. We're dead and that is it. No more."

- James Frey

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"I don't want to be alone. I have never wanted to be alone. I fucking hate it. I hate that I have no one to talk to, I hate that I have no one to call, I hate that I have no one to hold my hand, hug me, tell me everything is going to be all right....I hate that I have no one to share my hopes and my dreams with, I hate that I have no longer have any hopes or dreams, I hate that I have no one to tell me to hold on, that I can find them again. I hate that when I scream, and I scream bloody murder, that I am screaming into emptiness. I hate that there is no one to hear my scream and that there is no one to help me learn how to stop screaming."

- James Frey

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"Where the fuck did they make you, Kid? What's that mean? Where does someone like you come from? I've lived a lot of places. Like where? Why do you care? Just wondering. Stop wondering. Why? I don't want to make friends here. Why? I don't like good-byes. You gotta say them though. No, you don't."

- James Frey

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"Life is hard, Kid, you gotta be harder. You gotta take it on and fight for it and be a fucking man about how you live it. If you're too much of a pussy to do that, then maybe you should leave, 'cause you're dead already."

- James Frey

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"What I know is that I can trust his eyes because what lives in them, lives in me."

- James Frey

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"He starts to break and seeing him start to break makes me start to break and I don't want that. He steps forward and puts his arms around me and he hugs me and I hug him and it feels good and strong and pure and real. This is my Brother, my Blood, the only thing in this World created from which I am created from, the Person in this World who knows me best, the Person who would miss me most if I was gone. That he cared enough to come here and that he cares enough to nearly break in front of me means something, but in the end, I know that it means only so much."

- James Frey

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"...he lost the most important thing a human being can lose, which was his dignity. I know a bit about the loss of dignity. I know that when you take away a man's dignity there is a hole, a deep black hole filled with despair, humiliation and self-hatred, filled with emptiness, shame and disgrace, filled with loss and isolation and Hell. It's a deep, dark, horrible fucking hole, and that hole is where people like me live our sad-ass, fucked-up, dignity-free, inhuman lives, and where we die, alone, miserable, wasted and forgotten."

- James Frey

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"As I said before Kid, you walk out of here, and I'm having you brought back. As many times as it takes, I will have you brought the fuck back. You can go ahead and test me on that if you want, but I suggest you no. The smart thing would be to take my advice. I may be a coke Addict and a fellow Patient and a Fuck-Up of the First Order, but I am giving you good advice. Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with dignity and just hold on."

- James Frey

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"In the face of surviving long enough to survive in the long term, there is no goal that comes to mind that means anything to me. I could write Survive, but I would rather hold that word in my heart than write it on some fucking board."

- James Frey

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"I don't want safety or support. I want there to be me and whatever I have to face, be it alcohol or drugs or something else. I want there to be a fight because I know how to fight. There will be a winner of that fight. If it's me, I walk away and I have beat the shit that I didn't think I could ever beat and I move on with my life. If it's not me, at least I get it over with."

- James Frey

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"I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself."

- James Frey

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"I don't blame you for this and I don't think there's anything you could have done to stop it. I am what I am, which is an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and a Criminal, and I am whats I am because I made myself so. You did the best you could with me, and you loved me the best you could, and that's all I could have ever asked for from you. I have no excuses for what I've done or for who I am or for what I put you though all these years."

- James Frey

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"Take the risk and do whatever you can do and try not to get caught. If you do get caught, do it again."

- James Frey

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"The Addicts and Alcoholics give straight, simple answers. We ask no questions. Unlike the Family Members, we already know the answers. We fuck up your lives. We ruin every single one of your days. We are your worst nightmare. You don't know what to do with us. You're at the end of your rope. You don't know what to do. You're at the end of your fucking rope. You don't know what to do."

- James Frey

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"Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a decision to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision. Do I or don't I. Am I going to take or am I not going to waste my life or am I going to say no and try and stay sober and be a decent Person. It is a decision. Each and every time. A decision. String enough of those decisions together and you set a course and you set a standard of living. Addict or human. Genetics do not make that call. They are just an excuse. They allow people to say it wasn't my fault I am genetically predisposed. It wasn't my fault I was programmed from day one. It wasn't my fault I didn't have any say in the matter. Bullshit. Fuck that bullshit. There is always a decision. Take responsibility for it. Addict or human. It's a fucking decision. Each and every time."

- James Frey

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"I think it's bullshit. People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness so they place the blame on something that they're not responsible for, like a disease or genetics. As far as studies go, I could prove I was from Mars if you gave me enough time and enough resources."

- James Frey

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"Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work."

- James Frey

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"All of us started out normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives we got lost. Though we are here at this Clinic trying to find our way back, we all know that most of us will never get there. Things like the fight allow us to dream, and take us away from here, and allow us to imagine what the normal World must be like and how normal people must live in it."

- James Frey

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"I don't know if I lost the courage to kill myself, or gained the strength not to, but I didn't do it. I kept living and drinking and doing drugs and fucking up. Eventually I ended up here."

- James Frey

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"I was weak and pathetic and I couldn't control myself. An explanation, especially a bullshit one, doesn't alter the circumstances. I need to change, I have to change, and at this point, change is my only option, unless I am ready to die. All that matters is that I make myself something else and someone else for the future."

- James Frey

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"If you think you're making that choice, you're wrong. Your choices are made by the shit that controls you and the shit you can't quit. You walk out of here and that is going to kill you and that's fucking wrong. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe not my ass. How about walking back in and being a fucking man? How about walking back in and putting up a fucking fight? How about walking back in and doing what's decent and right and honorable and showing a little pride, just a little bit of fucking pride?"

- James Frey

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"[Leonard] gave me the best advice that I was given while I was at the center, which was to hold on. No matter how bad or difficult life becomes, if you hold on, hold on to whatever it is you need to hold on to, be it religion, friends, a support group, a set of steps or your own heart, if you hold on, just hold on, life will get better."

- James Frey

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"I had a screenplay once where I was 90 pages in and I knew it was all over. I knew it was a disaster. And it was driving me crazy because the studio had gone down a path with me, so there was no getting out and I didn’t know how to go past these 90 pages. And then it all worked out&mdash;and the change which made it from absolute despair that there was no way to save it to it all working out was minute. But, but key. INTERVIEWER: Which screenplay was that? JAMES L. BROOKS: Uh, it was Terms of Endearment."

- James L. Brooks

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"There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set&mdash;quite appropriately&mdash;and said, “I’m sorry, Jim. When you’re directing, you don’t need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do.” And, you know, and I WOULD be there&mdash;behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn’t even aware of."

- James L. Brooks

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"Now the sun touched the horizon and the man reined in his horse tiredly, glad that the time for prayer had come."

- James Clavell

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"Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."

- James Clavell

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"I can transport matter — anything — at the speed of light, perfectly. Of course this is only a crude beginning, but I've stumbled on the most important discovery since man sawed off the end of a tree trunk and found the wheel. The disintegrator-integrator will change life as we know it. Think what it means. Anything, even humans, will go through one of these devices. No need for cars or railways or airplanes, even spaceships. We'll set up matter-receiving stations throughout the world, and later the universe. There'll never be famine. Surpluses can be sent instantaneously at almost no cost, anywhere. Humanity need never want or fear again. I'm a very fortunate man, Hélène."

- James Clavell

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"God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible."

- James Clavell

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"I get so scared sometimes. The suddenness of our age! Electronics, rockets, earth satellites, supersonic flight, and now this. It's not so much who invents them. It's the fact they exist. … Everything's going so fast, I'm just not ready to take it all in. It's, it's all so quick"

- James Clavell

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"The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox."

- James Clavell

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"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous."

- James Clavell

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"Help! Help me! Please help me! Help me!"

- James Clavell

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"For Those Who Were There And Are Not. For Those Who Were There And Are For Him. But Most, For Her."

- James Clavell

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"Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon. Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls. Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. ... These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived."

- James Clavell

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"I'm going to get that bloody bastard if I die in the attempt."

- James Clavell

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"Grey was not alone in his hatred. The whole of Changi hated King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In the twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews and bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man."

- James Clavell

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"When you have an enemy it is wise to know his ways. The King knew as much about Grey as any man could know about another."

- James Clavell

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"All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach. If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too."

- James Clavell

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"To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about."

- James Clavell

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"There are no "mitigating circumstances" when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord."

- James Clavell

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"What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?"

- James Clavell

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"First she studied her husband's flower arrangement. He had chosen the blossom of a single white wild rose and put a single pearl of water on the green leaf, and set it on red stones. Autumn is coming, he was suggesting with the flower, talking through the flower, do not weep for the time of fall, the time of dying when the earth begins to sleep; enjoy the time of beginning again and experience the glorious cool of the autumn air on this summer evening...soon the tear will vanish and the rose, only the stones will remain — soon you and I will vanish and only the stones will remain."

- James Clavell

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"Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life."

- James Clavell

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"So much wealth and so much power, Armstrong thought, yet with a little luck, we can bring you down like Humpty-Dumpty..."

- James Clavell

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"Changi changed everyone, changed values permanently. For instance, it gave you a dullness about death — we saw too much of it to have the same sort of meaning to outsiders, to normal people. We are a generation of dinosaurs, we the few who survived. I suppose anyone who goes to war, any war, sees life with different eyes if they end up in one piece." What did you see?" "A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. … What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at."

- James Clavell

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"Just a moment, children — what does "pledge" mean?"

- James Clavell

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"Your old teacher never explained anything to you? I don't think that was very good. Not to explain. You can always ask me anything. That's what a real teacher should do."

- James Clavell

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"It is a very pretty flag. … I wish I could have a piece of it. I know! If it's so important, I think we should all have a piece of it. Don't you? … Now we should decide — who should be allowed to cut the first piece off!"

- James Clavell

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"I want a star!"

- James Clavell

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"Your daddy had to go back to school a little. He had some strange thoughts — and he wanted other grown-ups to believe them. It's not right for others to believe wrong thoughts, is it?"

- James Clavell

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"Perhaps my mommy should go back to school. Perhaps she should."

- James Clavell

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"God bless mommy and daddy, and please can we have some candy."

- James Clavell

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"Maybe we didn't pray hard enough. Perhaps we should kneel down like is done in church. Perhaps were using the wrong name. Instead of God, let's say "Our Leader." Let's pray to our leader for candy! Let's pray extra specially hard, and don't open your eyes until I say."

- James Clavell

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"I'm going to pray to our leader every time!"

- James Clavell

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"I put the candy on the desk. So you know, it doesn't matter who you shut your eyes and pray to — to God, or anyone, even our leader — no one will ever give you anything. Only another human being … only I, or someone like me, can give you things. Praying to God or anyone for something is a waste of time."

- James Clavell

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"Because Johnny was especially clever I think we should make him monitor for the whole week. Don't you?"

- James Clavell

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"I'm going to work hard not to have any wrong thoughts!"

- James Clavell

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"I asked all kinds of people of every age, "You know the 'I pledge allegiance…'" but before I could finish, at once they would all parrot it, the words almost always equally blurred. In every case discovered that not one teacher, ever — or anyone — had ever explained the words to any one of them. Everyone just had to learn it to say it. The Children's Story came into being that day. It was then that I realized how completely vulnerable my child's mind was — any mind for that matter — under controlled circumstances. Normally I write and rewrite and re-rewrite, but this story came quickly — almost by itself. Barely three words were changed. It pleases me greatly because it keeps asking me questions … Questions like what's the use of "I pledge allegiance" without understanding? Like why is it so easy to divert thoughts and implant others? Like what is freedom and why is it so hard to explain? The Children's Story keeps asking me all sorts of questions I cannot answer. Perhaps you can — then your children will…"

- James Clavell

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"I was a teenager when that [referring to WW2] started and of course wars are fought by teenagers. Do you realize that? They really should be fought by the politicians and the old people who start these wars."

- James Clavell

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"Changi for me — of course it's easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event — was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive."

- James Clavell

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"I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one. … In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money. … the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it."

- James Clavell

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"All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning."

- James Clavell

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"one of my favorite books-and I emphasize the word book here because I'm not talking about the movie-is The Godfather...Oh, yes, a book like Shogun."

- James Clavell

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"Although historians sometimes disputed the historical accuracy of Mr. Clavell's novels, no one doubted his gifts as a storyteller, or his ability to draw the reader into a faraway time and place."

- James Clavell

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"Shogun is irresistible… I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one… It's almost impossible not to continue to read Shogun once having opened it. Yet it is not only something that you read — you live it … possessed by the Englishman Blackthorne, the Japanese lord Toranaga and medieval Japan … People, customs, settings, needs and desires all become so enveloping you forget who and where you are."

- James Clavell

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"The Glittering Prizes"

- Frederic Raphael

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"A screenwriter is wise to have a life elsewhere."

- Frederic Raphael

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"Modest successes are better known as failures."

- Frederic Raphael

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"Who now reads novels as a guide to life and love? Everyone wants to star in his or her own movie."

- Frederic Raphael

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"Kubrick wasn’t making a movie when I was working with him. He was preparing to make a movie, which is something quite different. Part of the charm of working with a director like Kubrick, if there is or was a director like him, was that during the privileged period before he even showed (the script) to the studio, it was just between him and me. You are sort of creating a game in the ball court of theory. There is no film being shot; there is no budget. It was in many ways a very exciting time. It’s also very fraught, particularly for a writer, because you don’t know if it’s going to be of any point."

- Frederic Raphael

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"Although he was an intelligent man, I don’t think that he was a supreme intelligence. He had a sense of having missed a university education. He was working when he was 17. It may have been his choice because his father was not a poor man. I would not, to say the least, call him a frank man. He talked about a great many things and then would occasionally reveal little anecdotal aspects of his own life. He was not interested in our becoming buddies. He was avid for knowledge, which he hoped I possessed, and which I tried to give the impression I did. I don’t have any notion whatever of being omniscient."

- Frederic Raphael

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"He touched me... Control myself and try to act As if I remember my name But he touched me...he touched me... And suddenly nothing is the same!"

- Ira Levin

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"I feel guilty that Rosemary's Baby led to The Exorcist, The Omen [...] A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don't believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn't been so many of these books. Of course, [...] I didn't send back any of the royalty checks."

- Ira Levin

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"Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a four-room apartment in the Bramford had become available."

- Ira Levin

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"Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveller."

- Ira Levin

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"Someday, he thought, I would like to meet a monster who looked like a monster."

- Ira Levin

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"[Levin] is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores."

- Ira Levin

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"Then one day [i.e. while in the Los Angeles Public Library] I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me. I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing."

- John Fante

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"My father was teaching me his trade. I was his son and he was showing me how to write the way his own father from Torricella Peligna had shown him, as a boy, how to work a wall of stone or lay a row of brick. I was learning how to build books. Watching a master at work. Those would be the most important days of my life."

- John Fante

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""A butcher will always cheat a fool," she said."

- John Fante

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"He closed the door carefully, as though his whole life had been spent in the exact science of closing doors."

- John Fante

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"His mother had too much God in her."

- John Fante

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"But I was gone, hurrying through the darkness of the vast warehouse, only the echo of [Naylor's] voice reaching me. On the way out I passed through the wet clammy room where they dumped mackerel, from the fishing boats. But tonight there were no mackerel, the season had just ended, and instead there were tuna, the first real tuna I ever saw in such numbers, the floor littered with them, thousands of them scattered over a carpet of dirty ice, their white corpse-like bellies blundering through the semi-darkness. Some of them were still alive. You could hear the sporadic slapping of tails. There in front of me flapped the tail of one who was more alive than dead. I dragged him out of the ice. He was bitter cold and still kicking. I carried him as best I could, dragging him too, until I got him upon the cutting table where the women would dress him tomorrow. He was tremendous, weighing almost a hundred pounds, a monster of a fellow from another world, with great strength still left in his body, and a streak of blood coming from his eye, where he had been hooked. Strong as a man, he hated me and tried to break away from the cutting board. I pulled a gutting knife from the board and held it under his white pulsing gills. "You monster!" I said. "You black monster! Spell Weltanschauung! Go on - spell it!" But he was a fish from another world; he couldn't spell anything. The best he could do was fight for his life, and he was already too tired for that. But even so, he almost got away. I slugged him with my fist. Then I slid the knife under his gill, amused at his helpless gasping, and cut off his head. "When I said spell Weltanschauung, I meant it!" I pushed him back among his comrades upon the ice. "Disobedience means death." There was no response save the faint flapping of a tail somewhere in the blackness. I wiped my hands on a gunny sack and walked into the street toward home."

- John Fante

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"The afternoon moved like lava."

- John Fante

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"And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine."

- John Fante

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"I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the curb, and a man got out. He looked rich; and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and a night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the set morning air."

- John Fante

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"Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town."

- John Fante

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"The hotel was called the Alta Loma. It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels. If you had room 862, you got in the elevator and went down eight floors, and if you wanted to go down in the truck room, you didn't go down but up to the attic, one floor above the main floor."

- John Fante

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"Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he's never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can't write! No wonder there wasn't a woman in The Little Dog Laughed. No wonder it wasn't a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy."

- John Fante

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"You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died."

- John Fante

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"Then Lola Linton came on, slithering like a satin snake amid the tumult of whistling and pounding feet, Lola Linton lascivious, slithering and looting my body, and when she was through, my teeth ached from my clamped jaws and I hated the dirty lowbrow swine around me, shouting their share of a sick joy that belonged to me."

- John Fante

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"I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadow the quiet of almost two thousand years."

- John Fante

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"Mr. Hellfrick was an atheist, retired from the army, living on a meager pension, scarcely enough to pay his liquor bills, even though he purchased the cheapest gin on the market. He lived perpetually in a grey bathrobe without a cord or button, and though he made a pretense at modesty he really didn't care, so that his bathrobe was always open and you saw much hair and bones underneath."

- John Fante

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"In a little while all resistance was gone, and I knocked on Hellfrick's door. His room was madness, pulp western magazines over the floor, a bed with sheets blackened, clothes strewn everywhere, and clothes-hooks on the wall conspicuously naked, like broken teeth in a skull. There were dishes on the chairs, cigaret butts pressed out on the window sills...He was always drinking, day and night, but he never got drunk."

- John Fante

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"And I drank, greedily, until my throat suddenly choked and contracted and a horrible taste shook me. It was the kind of milk I hated. It was buttermilk. I spat it out, washed my mouth with water, and hurried to look at the other bottle. It was buttermilk, too."

- John Fante

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"Down on Spring Street, in a bar across the street from the secondhand store. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee. an old style place, sawdust on the floor, crudely drawn nudes smeared across the walls. It was a saloon where old men gathered, where the beer was cheap and smelled sour, where the past remained unaltered."

- John Fante

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"Suddenly she laughed again. It was a shriek, a mad laugh like the clatter of dishes and it was over as quickly as it began. I looked at her feet again. I could feel something inside her retreating. I wanted to hurt her."

- John Fante

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"Maybe this isn't coffee at all," I said. "Maybe it's just water after they boiled your filthy shoes in it." I looked up to her black blazing eyes. "Maybe you don't know any better. Maybe you're just naturally careless. But if I were a girl I wouldn't be seen in a Main Street alley with those shoes."

- John Fante

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"I don't remember what I did after I left her. Maybe I went up to Benny Cohen's room over the Grand Central Market. He had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets."

- John Fante

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"When I saw a policeman strolling toward me I walked away. It was a hot night. Sand from the Mojave had blown across the city. Tiny brown grains of sand clung to my fingertips whenever I touched anything, and when I got back to my room I found the mechanism of my new typewriter glutted with sand. It was in my ears and in my hair. When I took off my clothes it fell like powder to the floor. It was even between the sheets of my bed. Lying in the darkness, the red light from the St. Paul Hotel flashing on and off across my bed was bluish now, a ghastly color jumping into the room and out again."

- John Fante

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"Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was Over the Waves. Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odor of them."

- John Fante

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"I sat smiling wretchedly, my heart weeping for The Little Dog Laughed, for every well-turned phrase, for the little flecks of poetry through it, my first story, the best thing I could show for my whole life. It was the record of all that was good in me, approved and printed by the great J. C. Hackmuth, and she had torn it up and thrown it into a spittoon."

- John Fante

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"those huaraches--do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?"

- John Fante

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"I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. From sand and cactus we Americans had carved an empire. Camilla's people had had their chance. They had failed. We Americans had turned the trick. Thank God for my country. Thank God I had been born an American!"

- John Fante

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"I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged."

- John Fante

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"A cop won't pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he'll grab you."

- John Fante

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"You'll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you'll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you'll never have, but you'll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine."

- John Fante

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"But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done."

- John Fante

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"The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses...She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks...She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a well-dusted tomb...For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her...The tea was old. The sugar was old and lumpish. The tea cups were dusty, and somehow the tea tasted old and the little dried up cookies tasted of death. When I got up to leave, Bert followed me through the door and down the hall, daring me to think cynically of him."

- John Fante

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"The restless dust of Los Angeles fevered him. He was a greater wanderer than myself, and all day long he sought out perverse loves in the parks. But he was so ugly he never found his desire, and the warm nights with low stars and yellow moon tortured him away from his room until the dawn arrived...Some day he would leave this hated city, some day he would go back where friendship meant something, and sure enough, he went away and I got a postcard signed "Memphis Kid" from Fort Worth, Texas."

- John Fante

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"And the redheaded girl from St. Louis who always asked about the Filipinos...Endlessly she spoke of the Filipinos, pitied them, thought them so brave in the face of prejudice. One day she was gone, and another day I saw her again, walking the streets, her copper hair catching sunbeams, a short Filipino holding her arm. He was very proud of her. His padded shoulders and tight waisted suit were the ultimate of tenderloin fashion, but even with the high leather heels he was a foot shorter than she."

- John Fante

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"He had a way, that Hackmuth; he had a style; he had so much to give, even his commas and semi-colons had a way of dancing up and down. I used to tear the stamps off his envelopes, peel them off gently, to see what was under them."

- John Fante

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"Standing at the mirror, I tilted my hat over one eye and examined myself. The image in the glass seemed only vaguely familiar. I didn't like my new tie, so I took off my coat and tried another. I didn't like the change either. All at once everything began to irritate me. The stiff collar was strangling me. The shoes pinched my feet. The pants smelled like a clothing store basement and were too tight in the crotch. Sweat broke out at my temples where the hat band squeezed my skull. Suddenly I began to itch, and when I moved everything crackled like a paper sack. My nostrils picked up the powerful stench of lotions, and I grimaced. Mother in Heaven, what had happened to the old Bandini, author of The Little Dog Laughed? Could this hog-tied, strangling buffoon be the creator of The Long Lost Hills? I pulled everything off, washed the smells out of my hair, and climbed into my old clothes."

- John Fante

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"We drove him home, down Spring Street to First and over the railroad tracks to a black neighborhood that picked up the sounds of the rattling Ford and threw the echoes over an area of dirty frame houses and tired picket fences. He got out at a place where a dying pepper tree had spilled its brown leaves over the ground, and when he walked to the porch you could hear his feet wading through the hissing dead leaves."

- John Fante

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"She would go right through a stop signal if no cars were around, and when anyone got in her way she would smash her palm on the squealing horn and hold it there. The sound rose like a cry of help through the canyons of buildings. She kept doing this, no matter whether she needed it or not."

- John Fante

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"After a mile she complained about her feet and asked me to hold the wheel. As I did it she reached down and took off her shoes. Then she took the wheel again and threw one foot over the side of the Ford. At once her dress ballooned out, spanking her face. She tucked it under herself, but even so her brown thighs were exposed even to a pinkish underthing."

- John Fante

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"After Beverly Hills there was no fog. The palms along the road stood out green in the bluish darkness, and the white line in the pavement leaped ahead of us like a burning fuse. A few clouds tumbled and tossed, but there were no stars."

- John Fante

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"Below us the breakers flayed the land with white fists. They retreated and came back to flay it again. As each breaker retreated, the shoreline broke into an ever-widening grin. We coasted in second down the spiral road, the black pavement perspiring, fog tongues licking it. the air was so clean. We breathed it gratefully. There was no dust here."

- John Fante

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"She laughed and began undressing. She was brown underneath, but it was natural brown and not a tan. I was white and ghostlike. There was a blob of heaviness at my stomach. I pulled it in to hide it. She looked at the whiteness, at my loins and legs, and smiled. I was glad when she walked toward the water."

- John Fante

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"I drew my hands over her belly and legs, felt my own desire, searched foolishly for my passion, strained for it while she waited, rolled and tore my hair and begged for it, but there was none, there was none at all, only the retreat to Hackmuth's letter and thoughts that remained to be written, but no lust, only fear of her, and shame and humiliation."

- John Fante

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"Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl."

- John Fante

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"So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill."

- John Fante

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"And here was another place and another girl. Oh, how lonely she was, from away back in Minnesota. A good family too. Sure, honey. Tell my tired ears about your good family."

- John Fante

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"Dear little Vivian, all the way from the clean fields of Minnesota, and not a Swede either, and almost a virgin too, just a few men short of being a virgin."

- John Fante

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"I sat before my typewriter and the great awful void descended, and I beat my head with my fists, put a pillow under my aching buttocks and made little noises of agony."

- John Fante

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"She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn't know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old."

- John Fante

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"I tried to answer but she interrupted and went off in a Barrymore manner, speaking deeply and tragically; murmuring of the pity of it all, the stupidity of it all, the absurdity of a hopelessly bad writer like myself buried in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles, California, of all places, writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget."

- John Fante

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"She kissed me, her mouth tasting of liverwurst on rye. She sat back, breathing with relief. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my forehead...She pulled me down and her arms went around me and we fought until I thought it was absurd. I sat back and tried to think of another escape."

- John Fante

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"She watched me like a prize dog, and Solomon watched her like a criminal."

- John Fante

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"Forgive my body!" she said. She put her arms out to me, the tears flowing down her cheeks. "Think of my soul!" she said. "My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!"

- John Fante

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"I had to go through with it, and I turned around and she was nude except for hose and shoes, and then I saw the wounds. It was at the loins; it was a birthmark or something, a burn, a seared place, a pitiful, dry, vacant place where flesh was gone, where the thighs suddenly became small and shriveled and the flesh seemed dead. I closed my jaws and then I said, "What--that? Is that all, just that? It's nothing, a mere trifle." But I was losing the words, I had to say them quickly or they would never form."

- John Fante

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"Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I'll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster. If it wasn't for you, this woman would not be so maimed, and neither would the world, and if it wasn't for you I could have had Camilla Lopez down at the beach, but no!"

- John Fante

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"The name on the mailbox was Vera Rivken, and that was her full name. It was down on the Long Beach Pike, across the street from the Ferris Wheel and the Roller Coaster. Downstairs a poolhall, upstairs a few single apartments. No mistaking that flight of stairs; it possessed her odor. The banister was warped and bent, and the grey wallpaint was swollen, with puffed places that cracked open when I pushed them with my thumb."

- John Fante

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"No chance to speak, she was over me again, clinging like a wet vine, her tongue like a frightened snake's head, searching my mouth."

- John Fante

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"Then she came out of the kitchen with a glass of milk in her hand. "Here," she offered. "A cool drink." But it wasn't cool at all, it was almost hot, and there was a yellowish scum on the top, and sipping it I tasted her lips and the strong food she ate, a taste of rye bread and Camembert cheese."

- John Fante

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"But the room seemed so poor, pleading for warmth and joy. Vera Rivken's room. She had been nice to Arturo Bandini, and she was poor. I took the small roll from my pocket, peeled off two one dollar bills, and laid them on the table. Then I walked down the stairs, my lungs full of air, elated, my muscles so much stronger than ever before."

- John Fante

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"It crept upon me--the restlessness, the loneliness. What was the matter...Then it came to me like crashing and thunder, like death and destruction. I got up from the counter and walked away in fear, walking fast down the boardwalk, passing people who seemed strange and ghostly: the world seemed a myth, a transparent plane, and all things upon it were here for only a little while..."

- John Fante

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"Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths."

- John Fante

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"Now there were screams. then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this...You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God...Great clouds of dust...Up in that room on that bed you did it."

- John Fante

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"An old woman wept among the white faces. Two men carrying a body. An old dog crawling on his belly, dragging his hind legs. Several bodies in the corner of the lot, beside a shed, blood-soaked sheets covering them. An ambulance."

- John Fante

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"Far down the street I saw the building where Vera lived. Hanging from the wall, like a man crucified, was the bed."

- John Fante

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"the city was the same, but I was afraid. The streets lurked with danger. The tall buildings forming black canyons were traps to kill you when the earth shook. The pavement might open. The street cars might topple."

- John Fante

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"I didn't care. It was better to be a live coward than a dead madman. These people walking in and out of huge concrete buildings--someone should warn them. It would come again...Los Angeles was doomed. It was a city with a curse upon it."

- John Fante

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"I saw the earth open like a huge mouth, then close again over the paved street. An old man was trapped by the foot. I ran to him, told him to be brave while I hacked the pavement with a fireman's axe. But I was too late. The vise tightened, bit his leg off at the knee. I carried him away. His knee is still there, a bloody souvenir sticking out of the earth."

- John Fante

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"The world was dust, and dust it would become...I gave up cigarets for a few days. I bought a new rosary. I poured nickels and dimes into the Poor Box. I pitied the world."

- John Fante

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"His meat craze had got out of hand. All day I heard him frying cheap steaks, the odor creeping under my door. It gave me a mad desire for meat...But he never offered me so much as the scraps from his plate."

- John Fante

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"That night he walked into my room. He sat on the bed, his long arms dangling to the floor...Then he began on the subject of meat. "How would you like a big thick steak?" he said, his lips loose."

- John Fante

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"I watched him tiptoe toward the barn door. I cursed him and waited tensely. In a little while I heard the mooing of a cow. It was a piteous cry. Then I heard a thud and a scuffle of hoofs. Out of the barn door came Hellfrick. Across his shoulder lay a dark mass, weighing him down. Behind him, mooing continually, a cow followed...It was a calf, blood spurting from a gash between the ears...I was sick, very sick. It was plain murder."

- John Fante

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"All the way home Hellfrick was exultant, but the steering wheel was sticky with blood, and once or twice I thought I heard the calf kicking in the back seat...On bunker Hill we turned down our alley and pulled up at the parking space adjacent the hotel wall. Hellfrick got out. "Now I'm going to give you a lesson in butchering.""

- John Fante

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"I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out of Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder!"

- John Fante

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"Another magazine wanted the Long Lost Hills in digest form. A hundred dollars. I was rich again. A time for amends, for righting the past. I sent my mother five dollars."

- John Fante

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"God Almighty, dear God, good to me, gave me a sweet tongue, and these sad and lonely folk will hear me and they shall be happy."

- John Fante

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"Every move she made, the soft turn of her neck, the large breasts swelling under the smock, her fine hands upon the bed, the fingers spread out, these things disturbed me, a sweet painful heaviness dragging me into stupor. Then the sound of her voice, restrained, hinting of mockery, a voice that talked to my blood and bones."

- John Fante

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"All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips."

- John Fante

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"Mean?" I said. "My dear girl, I am equally fond of man and beast alike. There is not the slightest drop of enmity in my system. After all, you can't be mean and still be a great writer."

- John Fante

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"The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Gatling. They don't like Texas Rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Gatling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and the women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there."

- John Fante

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"I turned around and saw the crease on the bed where Camilla had been seated, the sensuous contour where her thighs and hips had sunk beneath the softness of the blue chenille bedspread. then I forgot Sammy, and wild with longing I threw myself upon my knees before the spot and kissed it reverently."

- John Fante

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"Dear Sammy: That little whore was here tonight; you know Sammy, the little Greaser dame with a wonderful figure and a mind for a moron...having read the bile your manuscripts contain, let me speak for the world at large and say at once that your departure is everybody's good fortune. You can't write, Sammy...I speak for all sensible, civilized men when I urge you to burn this mass of literary manure and thereafter stay away from pen and ink."

- John Fante

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"The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness...All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down."

- John Fante

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"You don't understand Mexican women. They don't like to be treated like human beings. If you're nice to them, they walk all over you."

- John Fante

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"You try so hard to be an American," I said. "why do you do that? Take a look at yourself"..."And all that paint on your face. You look awful--a cheap imitation of an American. You look frowsy. If I were a Mexican I'd knock your head off. You're a disgrace to your people."

- John Fante

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"She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle."

- John Fante

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"She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips toward my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, "Hello.""

- John Fante

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"She sat there, the white of saliva at the ends of her mouth, her teeth gritted, her hands pulling at her long hair, her face fighting off a scream, but it didn't matter; she could scream if she liked, for Arturo Bandini wasn't queer, there was nothing at all wrong with Arturo Bandini; why, he had a passion like six men, that boy, he had felt it coming to the surface: some guy, mighty writer, mighty lover; right with the world, right with his prose."

- John Fante

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"Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven."

- John Fante

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"Then she tried to show me how to hold the gun. I jerked it away from her, flung the barrel recklessly in all directions."

- John Fante

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"A bell was supposed to ring when the bull's eye was hit. Not a sound. I emptied the gun, sniffed the tart stench of powder, and made a face. Tim and Camilla laughed at the sissy. By now a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. They all shared Camilla's disgust, for it was a contagious thing, and I felt it too."

- John Fante

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"Still sneering, she looked at me quickly, and let out the clutch. I was thrown against the seat, then against the windshield. We were jammed between two other cars. She banged into one, and then into the other, her way of letting me know what a fool I had been."

- John Fante

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"I stepped inside. It was almost pitch dark, smelling of old underwear and the sleep of a sick body. A feeble light came from a crack in the window covered by a slice of sacking. Before I could stop him, Sammy had bolted the door...Vapors spilled from our mouths in the cold air. "Let her in, Sammy," I said. "What the hell.""

- John Fante

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"Camilla cooked breakfast for us, and we ate from plates on our laps. The fare was fried corn meal and bacon and eggs. Sammy ate with the peculiar robustness of unhealthy people. After the meal, Camilla gathered the tin plates and washed them. Then she had her own breakfast, seated in a far corner, quiet except for the sound of her fork against the tin plate."

- John Fante

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"We drove into the Los Angeles Black Belt, Central Avenue, night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank for the whites."

- John Fante

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"Far away like frightened birds, the echo of our feet floated through the upper floors. We climbed three flights of stairs and proceeded the length of another hall. At the end was a door. The Negro opened it."

- John Fante

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"So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, and apartment in Los Angeles."

- John Fante

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"The dark corridor of that Central Avenue Hotel, the sinister Negro, the black room and the hopheads, and now the girl who loved a man who hated her. It was all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness. Midnight on Temple Street, a can of marijuana between us. She lay there, her long fingers dangling to the carpet, waiting, listless, tired."

- John Fante

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"We smoked them down until they burned our fingertips. Then I rolled two more. In the middle of the second it began to come, the floating, the wafting away from the earth, the joy and triumph of a man over space, the extraordinary sense of power."

- John Fante

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"When it was all gone, the dream of floating toward bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction."

- John Fante

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"I opened the door, and there he stood, a telegraph boy. I signed for the telegram, sat on the bed, and wondered if the wine had finally got the Old Man's heart. The telegram said: your book accepted mailing contract today. Hackmuth. That was all. I let the paper float to the carpet. I just sat there. Then I got down on the floor and began kissing the telegram. I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over."

- John Fante

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"I tried the door. It opened, darkness inside, and I switched on the light. She lay there in the Murphy bed. Her face was the face of an old rose pressed and dried in a book, yellowish, with only the eyes to prove there was life in it. The room stank. The blinds were down, the door opened with difficulty until I kicked away the rug against the crack."

- John Fante

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"I prowled the city with my Ford: I found mysterious alleys, lonely trees, rotting old houses out of a vanished past. Day and night I lived in my Ford, pausing only long enough to order a hamburger and a cup of coffee at strange roadside cafes."

- John Fante

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"She rose and looked at me with delirious black eyes, black and wanton and in a dream, her neck stretched and defining the bulging cords at her throat. she had nothing to say with her lips, but the ghastly cast of her face, the teeth too white and too big now, the frightened smile, these spoke too loudly of the horror shrouding her days and nights...As I walked toward the bed, she pulled up her knees, slipping into a crouched frightened position, as though she expected me to strike her."

- John Fante

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"I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face. It didn't look like insanity to me. It looked like fear, the terrible fear screaming from her big hungered eyes, alert now from the drug."

- John Fante

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"All at once I was full of plans. Laguna Beach! That was the place for her. It was winter now, and we could get a place cheap. I could take care of her and get started on another book. I had an idea for a new book. We didn't have to be married, brother and sister was alright with me."

- John Fante

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"Willie was sound asleep in her lap, but he sucked her little finger. South of Long Beach we stopped at a drugstore and bought a bottle with a nipple, and a bottle of milk. Willie's eyes opened when she put the nipple to his mouth. He fell to his task like a fiend. Camilla lifted her arms high, ran her fingers through her hair, and yawned with pleasure."

- John Fante

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"That night I slept there, but the next morning I began to hate the place. With her there it was part of a dream; without her, it was a house. I packed my things into the rumble seat and drove back to Los Angeles."

- John Fante

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"I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. I looked at the faces around me, and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast. I had to get away from that town."

- John Fante

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"The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold."

- John Fante

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"Far out across the Mojave there arose the shimmer of heat. I made my way up the path to the Ford. In the seat was a copy of my book, my first book. I found a pencil, opened the book to the fly leaf, and wrote: To Camilla, with love, Arturo I carried the book a hundred yards into the desolation, toward the southeast. With all my might I threw it far out in the direction she had gone. Then I got into the car, started the engine, and drove back to Los Angeles."

- John Fante

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"I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. [...] I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write."

- John Fante

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"Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women."

- John Fante

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"I had come to the limits of shooting pool, playing poker and bullshitting over beers, of driving off with other guys and broads into lonely orchards, clawing clumsily at skirts and panties, clawing in vain. Women were fine but demanding, you hurt easily at nineteen; you thought women were sweet and submissive but find them alley cats; you find comfort in whores less deceitful, and if you are lucky you learn to read."

- John Fante

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"Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his books in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write."

- John Fante

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"I lay on my back and thought of the future. Any hopes for writing would have to be postponed. What mattered now was just staying alive. From that day forward I resolved never to be poor again. I would work hard for Coletti and the Toyo Fish Company. I would hoard every penny. I would jingle coins in my pocket and store away dollars in the bank. I would cover my body, my life, with money. I would be impregnable. I would not be hurt again."

- John Fante

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"You ain't gonna live forever, so enjoy it while you can."

- John Fante

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"A man could change, if only to survive."

- John Fante

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"You never know, he thought. You just never know. You drift along, year after year, presuming certain values to be fixed; like being able to drive on a public thoroughfare without somebody trying to murder you. You came to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off. One shocking incident and all the years of logic and acceptance are displaced and, suddenly, the jungle is in front of you again. Man, part animal, part angel. Where had he come across that phrase? He shivered. It was entirely an animal in that truck out there."

- Richard Matheson

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"Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form."

- Richard Matheson

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"It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements."

- Richard Matheson

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"Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. This quest for enlightenment must begin now. It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late."

- Richard Matheson

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"My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?"

- Richard Matheson

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"I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I’ve written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death — the finest tribute any writer could receive. ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel."

- Richard Matheson

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"I hate it when something I’ve had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels."

- Richard Matheson

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"I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another. Actually, the highlight of my life — which, of course, had an enormous influence on my writing career — was meeting Ruth Woodson on the beach in Santa Monica in 1951, falling in love with her, marrying her, and creating with her a family of four children; two sons, two daughters. My love for them, and growth because of them, made my writing life what it was. It’s a process I advocate for any would-be writer."

- Richard Matheson

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"I think we’re yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don’t believe in the "supernatural," I believe in the "supernormal." To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it’s because we haven’t been able to understand it yet."

- Richard Matheson

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"I have come to the final judgment that I am not a man any longer. I am a figment, a concoction, an overblown invention born of low-grade whiskey and high-grade journalistic distortion; of street and saloon gossip and dime-novel bombast."

- Richard Matheson

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"I can get pissed off very easily."

- Richard Matheson

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"X — This day when it had light mother called me a retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch."

- Richard Matheson

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"It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like."

- Richard Matheson

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"I thought what father said. Oh god he said. And only eight."

- Richard Matheson

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"This day father hit in the chain again before it had light. I have to try to pull it out again. He said I was bad to come upstairs. He said never do that again or he would beat me hard. That hurts."

- Richard Matheson

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"I am not so glad. All day it is cold in here. The chain comes slow out of the wall. And I have a bad anger with mother and father. I will show them. I will do what I did that once. I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn't be nice to me. If they try to beat me again I'll hurt them. I will."

- Richard Matheson

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"Be this the final entry In mankind’s book of psalms He knit his shroud with atoms And dug his grave with bombs."

- Richard Matheson

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"The memory of you shall not perish with your untimely sepulture. You are, dear friend, not so much out of the game as playing on another field."

- Richard Matheson

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"They passed churches. People were packed inside them. They overflowed out onto the steps. “Poor fools,” Richard muttered, his hands still shaking. Norman took a deep breath. “I wish I was a poor fool,” he said. “A poor fool who could believe in something.” “Maybe,” Richard said. Then he added, “I’d rather spend the last day believing what I think is true.”"

- Richard Matheson

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"I don’t know why I thought that would help but I called him. I’d have called anyone just to have another mind to help. Parents are useless beings when they’re afraid for their children."

- Richard Matheson

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"They were strange, the facts about them: their staying inside by day, their avoidance of garlic, their death by stake, their reputed fear of crosses, their supposed dread of mirrors. Take that last, now. According to legend, they were invisible in mirrors, but he knew that was untrue. As untrue as the belief that they transformed themselves into bats. That was a superstition that logic, plus observation had easily disposed of. ‘It was equally foolish to believe that they could transform themselves into wolves. Without a doubt there were vampire dogs; he had seen and heard them outside his house at night. But they were only dogs."

- Richard Matheson

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"Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century. Well, it was true."

- Richard Matheson

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"Well, it was true. ... True, he thought, but no one ever got the chance to know it. Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn’t be that — not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that. And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything."

- Richard Matheson

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"The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it."

- Richard Matheson

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"Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder."

- Richard Matheson

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"To his complete astonishment, he later found himself offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second. Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog."

- Richard Matheson

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"Sometimes he had indulged in daydreams about finding someone. More often, though, he had tried to adjust to what he sincerely believed was the inevitable — that he was actually the only one left in the world. At least in as much of the world as he could ever hope to know."

- Richard Matheson

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"A woman. Alive. In the daylight. He stood, mouth partly open, gaping at the woman. She was young, he could see now as she came closer; probably in her twenties. She wore a wrinkled and dirty white dress. She was very tan, her hair was red. In the dead silence of the afternoon Neville thought he heard the crunch of her shoes in the long grass. I’ve gone mad. The words presented themselves abruptly. He felt less shock at that possibility than he did at the notion that she was real. He had, in fact, been vaguely preparing himself for just such a delusion. It seemed feasible. The man who died of thirst saw mirages of lakes. Why shouldn’t a man who thirsted for companionship see a woman walking in the sun?"

- Richard Matheson

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"All these years, he thought, dreaming about a companion. Now I meet one and the first thing I do is distrust her, treat her crudely and impatiently. And yet there was really nothing else he could do. He had accepted too long the proposition that he was the only normal person left. It didn’t matter that she looked normal. He’d seen too many of them lying in their coma that looked as healthy as she. They weren’t, though, and he knew it. The simple fact that she had been walking in the sunlight wasn’t enough to tip the scales on the side of trusting acceptance. He had doubted too long. His concept of the society had become ironbound. It was almost impossible for him to believe that there were others like him. And, after the first shock had diminished, all the dogma of his long years alone had asserted itself."

- Richard Matheson

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"His sex drive had diminished, had virtually disappeared. Salvation of the monk, he thought. The drive had to go sooner or later, or no normal man could dedicate himself to any life that excluded sex. Now, happily, he felt almost nothing; perhaps a hardly discernible stirring far beneath the rocky strata of abstinence. He was content to leave it at that. Especially since there was no certainty that Ruth was the companion he had waited for. Or even the certainty that he could allow her to live beyond tomorrow. Cure her? Curing was unlikely."

- Richard Matheson

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"I’m writing this note, though, because I want to save you if I can. When I was first given the job of spying on you, I had no feelings about your life. Because I did have a husband, Robert. You killed him. But now it’s different. I know now that you were just as much forced into your situation as we were forced into ours. We are infected. But you already know that. What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do that and we’re going to set up society again slowly but surely. We’re going to do away with all those wretched creatures whom death has cheated. And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you."

- Richard Matheson

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"Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend."

- Richard Matheson

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"I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed."

- Richard Matheson

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"Well, why not? My dream woman has always been unavailable to me. What difference does a mere three-quarters of a century make?"

- Richard Matheson

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"To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight. She in 1896, me in 1971."

- Richard Matheson

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"Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point "in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.""

- Richard Matheson

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"I wish I were a boy again—unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment. I had that feeling when I first stared at her photograph; I was emotionally overwhelmed. Now reality impinges. I’m pulled in two directions simultaneously—toward yearning and toward reason. It’s at times like this I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple."

- Richard Matheson

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"I will try to be consistent, no longer oscillating like some planet that has lost its way. For, at long last, I have found my sun."

- Richard Matheson

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"What does that motto on the wall of your office say? That which you believe becomes your world."

- Richard Matheson

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"Heaven would never be heaven without you."

- Richard Matheson

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"Thank you...for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence."

- Richard Matheson

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"Let this hell be our heaven."

- Richard Matheson

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"As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide."

- Richard Matheson

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"They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it...It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful."

- Richard Matheson

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"What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own when self-pretense is no longer possible?"

- Richard Matheson

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"If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease...Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about the end of their lives."

- Richard Matheson

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"Does a man’s existence change in any way when he removes his overcoat? Neither does it change when death removes the overcoat of his body. He’s still the same person. No wiser. No happier. No better off. Exactly the same. "Death is merely continuation at another level.""

- Richard Matheson

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"I'd been in the densest part of the earth's aura he told me, an aqueous region which was the source of myths about the waters of Lethe, the River Styx."

- Richard Matheson

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"I've been very fortunate throughout my career. And I've been lucky enough to have worked with some great and talented people, like Price and Serling. I was just a part of the whole phenomenon coming together. They were exciting times that bubbled over with energy for all those involved."

- Richard Matheson

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"When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites."

- Richard Matheson

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"I've always considered myself an offbeat writer. Out here in California they like to categorize, so I'm a science fiction writer. I wrote science fiction to break into the writing business. My love is fantasy. I wrote one of my early novels in four days sitting in a closet which I'd converted into an office, using an old Smith-Corona that my parents had given me for Christmas when I was 12."

- Richard Matheson

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"George Romero filmed an homage to the book, and he called it Night of the Living Dead. Homage means I can make the picture and I don't have to pay you for your book. As a teen-ager I saw the movie "Dracula," and it occurred to me that if one vampire was scary, a whole world populated by vampires would be really scary."

- Richard Matheson

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"All through the years, I've had many interests. I always wanted to write a swashbuckler; I still do. I love Westerns. I wrote a western called "Journal of the Gun Years," which won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. It had been written some time ago and rejected by every publisher, perhaps because I had been cast in the science fiction mold. I finished writing a combination western and horror story indigenous to the period. And horror takes many forms: Indians had their own superstitions based on things that they didn't understand. In a way, I like to be confusing by combining genres. I've always been fascinated by parapsychology, and I think that we've all lived before. In "The Path" I've explored that and a few other age-old questions like why are we here and what's our purpose in life."

- Richard Matheson

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"To me, I don't even think of life after death. To me, life after death and reincarnation are just slices of the pie. Life is a huge wheel and it goes around and around, and life after death is just a segment of that. It comes down to spiritual growth. I think that we keep coming back until we learn what we need to learn, until we get it right. I think we've all lived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. That which you think becomes your world. It's only when we're alive and in this world that we have the chance to progress. From the state of the world today, we haven't made much progress."

- Richard Matheson

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"Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it."

- Richard Matheson

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"Matheson gets closer to his characters than anyone else in the field of fantasy today. ... You don’t read a Matheson story — you experience it."

- Richard Matheson

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"He has many … virtues, notably an unusual agility in trick prose and trick construction and a too-little-recognized (or exercised) skill on offtrail humor; but his great strength is his power to take a reader inside a character or a situation."

- Richard Matheson

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"I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me."

- Richard Matheson

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"While Mr. Matheson's name is not as recognizable as that of Mr. King, perhaps no author living is as responsible for chilling a generation with tantalizing nightmare visions born of Golden Age television. Together with Rod Serling, Mr. Matheson wrote many of the classic Twilight Zone episodes for the original CBS series, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "Little Girl Lost" and "Third From the Sun.""

- Richard Matheson

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"I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."

- Richard Matheson

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"The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values."

- Alan Alda

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"My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six."

- Alan Alda

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"… life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there."

- Alan Alda

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"You don't put statistics on trial, you put individuals on trial."

- Alan Alda

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"One of the most basic things I've tried to do is give people a greater understanding of how science works - the importance of evidence, the importance of many trials, of rigorous studies, and the idea that we learn only a little bit at a time. . . . Making people aware of that process helps increase appreciation and respect for science, and that helps us make informed decisions for our families and ourselves."

- Alan Alda

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"I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be."

- Alan Alda

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"Screen credit is valuable only when it's given you. If you're in a position to give yourself credit, you don't need it."

- Irving Thalberg

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"Nothing is unfair in politics"

- Irving Thalberg

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"To the delight of millions of little children, the Santa in New York's great parade will be half of a same-sex couple. And guess who the other half will be? Me! Harvey Fierstein, nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, dressed in holiday finery portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"Hello, boys. How are you all? I just love boys. [...] Hello. Are you here alone? Who are you with? ...A woman? At my show? ...We'll make believe. It's theatre."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"I’ve been travelling a lot. My boyfriend and I, we just went to Santa Fe. You know, the one named after the gay saint. Has anybody ever been to Santa Fe? …did you know it was a desert? I didn’t know it was a desert. Hated it! People had been telling me for years, if you’re an artist, a non-conformist, come to Santa Fe! I mean, it’s the place you can be yourself! The light, the light, you can paint here! You can live here, the space, the sky! – The fucking dust! I was doing an AIDS benefit there – like what else do I do with my life? – and I said, look, I’m a guest here, you’re paying for the hotel, I don’t mean to insult nobody, but I got a little suggestion for you. If I was yaz, I’d take a hose, hook it up to Colorado, and water this fucking place!"

- Harvey Fierstein

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"Do you remember at the presidential convention where they nominated Bush? Did you know what song they played to bring Bush on stage? No. “The Best of Times” from La Cage aux Folles. I said some fag pulled a fast one on them!"

- Harvey Fierstein

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"I live in a small fictional town in Connecticut."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"See, I went to an all-gay high school. Art and Design. Now the truth is it wasn’t really all gay, but they bused them in, it was the law. [...] So I went to this high school, I had friends like Pablo. Pablo used to breast-feed a porcelain doll during math. You know. My friend Lauren used to roll cigarettes on her boots."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"You’d probably just lost your virginity, I’d probably just lost count."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"We had great sex, but we argued politics. [...] Now we enjoy politics and argue sex."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"Now they know who we are. We’re counted in their surveys, we’re numbered in their watchfulness, we’re powered in their press. We’re courted, polled, placated. Now they know that we’re teachers and doctors and lawyers and priests and mothers and babies. Now they see us everywhere. Hospitals, theatres, classrooms. Obituaries. Now when they tell lies about us, we answer back. We found our voices. We know who we are. They know who we are. And they know that we care what they think."

- Harvey Fierstein

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"I was writing the 'Great American Novel' and Dick was writing the 'Great American Symphony'. Together we were digging the 'Great American Hole-In-The-Ground'."

- Robert B. Sherman

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"It took us ten years to become an overnight success."

- Robert B. Sherman

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"The Unicorn Sonata … tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes — and our ears — to find it."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"What am I always telling you, big girl? Never bet on anything except human stupidity."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Kings need jugglers, jugglers don’t need kings…"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"“She’s a lady,” I says, “for all she’s a Portygee, and you’re no more a gentleman than that monkey in your mango tree. Money don’t make such as us into gentlemen, Henry Lee. All it does, it makes us rich monkeys. You know that, same as me.”"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"But that instant, that particular recognition, remains indelible. Some memories do come to live with you for good and all, like wives or husbands."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Sometimes, in those nights when the dreams and memories I cannot always tell apart anymore keep me awake, I try to imagine what my life would have been if I had actually carried my plan through. Different, most likely. Shorter, surely."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"We stared at each other in silence for some while, and then I asked him, most politely, “What are you?” “What I need to be,” he answered. “Now this, now that, as necessary. As are we all.”"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"So they believe, and they take poorly to having it named nonsense. Which I am very nearly sure it is."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Didn’t listen, did he? They never do. That’s the nature of a Goro. Just as not wanting to know things is the nature of humans."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"“There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.”"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"“Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it. We’d much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we’re ravens and there you are. Ravens don’t feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place.” He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.”"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"“The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I’ve always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you’ve seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"You’re greediest when you’re born, and after that it’s downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn’t demand anything."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I was lost too. What else would I have been doing in Iowa?"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He had foreseen every such change in his fortune, ignored it always, and called the refusal innocence."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"“I’ll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, ‘The soul selects her own society.’ I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, ’Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.’”"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn’t the good guys win, but there weren’t any good guys."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Love is not an excuse for bad taste."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I am infected with life and will die of it in time."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. … Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull's dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as did so he felt his immortality fall from him like an armour, or like a shroud."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in my heart as long as that joy — save one, and I thank you for that, too."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"I am the only Unicorn there is? The Last? … That cannot be. Why would I be the last? What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished. We do not vanish. … There has never been a time without unicorns. We live forever! We are as old as the sky, old as the moon! We can be hunted, trapped; we can even be killed if we leave our forests, but we do not vanish. … Am I truly the last?"

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Don't look back, and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal; it attracts their attention."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"There are no happy endings because nothing ends."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He gave them no titles; he never saw the point of doing so. If a poem did not tell you immediately what it was about, then, to Claudio Bianchi, it needed more help than a label was likely to provide."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"He was only mildly startled that la strega was aware of his relationship with Giovanna: having lived most of his life in or near small southern villages, he would have been far more surprised if she had not."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"You are not mean. Cranky is different."

- Peter S. Beagle

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"Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers — we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I might have been smashed to atoms, and in the open may survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier survives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." "Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp. "I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other—" "Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, "I don't feel myself offended." "Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, "it doesn't apply to tramps like you." "Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"A hospital alone shows what war is."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions live in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought—it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude—it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"The soldiers who faced one another along the Western Front were drawn from remarkably similar societies. On both sides there were industrial workers and farm labourers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. On both sides there were Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Anyone seeking fundamental differences of national character will look in vain in the records of the trenches. There could be no better illustration of this point than four of the finest novels written about the war by former soldiers - Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Frederic Manning's Middle Parts of Fortune and Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade - which depict the experience of service in the ranks in almost interchangeable ways."

- Erich Maria Remarque

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"Tell your friend, Veronica It's time you celebrate Chanukah I hope I get a harmonica On this lovely, lovely Chanukah So drink your gin and tonic-ah And smoke your marijuani-khah If you really, really wanna-kah Have a happy, happy, happy, happy Chanukah Happy Chanukah"

- Adam Sandler

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"Paul Newman's half Jewish and Florence Henderson's half, too Put them together, What a fine looking Jew!"

- Adam Sandler

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"I wanted to see the fucking score! What do you got to do that's so fucking important? You can't join the religious cult with me!"

- Adam Sandler

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"Hey, that last skit was written for a reason. If any of your buddies had fooled around with a sixty year old man, don't throw them out of your car, or you will die. Now, enjoy the rest of the album!"

- Adam Sandler

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"I've met Adam Sandler a couple of times and he's a nice guy, smart and personable. Considering what I've written about his movies, he could also be described as forgiving and tactful. What I cannot understand is why he has devoted his career to finding new kinds of obnoxious voices and the characters to go along with them."

- Adam Sandler

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"The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. Watching this film, you can imagine him in Dennis Hopper roles. He has darkness, obsession and power."

- Adam Sandler

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"I'd like to name my kid a whole phrase. You know, something like "Ladies and Gentlemen". That'll be a cool name for a kid. "This is my son, Ladies and Gentlemen!" Then, when he gets out of hand, I get to go, "Ladies and Gentlemen, please!""

- Louis C.K.

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"They charged me 15 dollars. That's how much it costs to only have 20 dollars."

- Louis C.K.

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"What comedy really is is connecting with a group of people, and just speaking at a heightened level without any barriers and saying things that are raw id, and having people really respond to it. You know, that’s really what it is, and that’s why there are people that I look at as comedy role models that aren’t comedians, like Muhammad Ali. The way he spoke to audiences and crowds and stuff, if you watch some of his preaching to Nation of Islam crowds? Hilarious, and amazing, like he knew who the people were. He said, “You know what the fuck I’m talking about!” and he explained it to them."

- Louis C.K.

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"It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There’s never a technological advancement where people think, “Wow, we can finally do this!” … And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deserve everything to be perfect all the time."

- Louis C.K.

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"I just don’t trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there’s been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there’s a part of me that goes, “This can’t be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It’s not like there’s actually more of anything. It’s just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they’re not actually producing anything, it can’t end well."

- Louis C.K.

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"I think of boxing a lot with standup. I even train with boxing trainers"

- Louis C.K.

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"Everything that’s difficult you should be able to laugh about."

- Louis C.K.

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"Credibility lasts about two cycles of bad material, and then you’ll probably never get it back. If you let people down, that’s really hard to come back from– harder than climbing from nothing to something, even."

- Louis C.K.

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"Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you’re all gonna die and then you’re gonna be dead for way longer than you’re alive. Like that’s mostly what you’re ever gonna be. You’re just dead people that didn’t die yet."

- Louis C.K.

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"Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce … That would be sad. If two people were married and they were really and they just had a great thing and then they got divorced, that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times."

- Louis C.K.

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"I'll do all the announcements that you would have heard. Please turn off your cell phones. You can take pictures but turn off the flash. That's stupid, because it's not-- You know when you're watching the World Series and there's all that-- Like your flash is lighting Yankee Stadium. Just leave your flash off. Don't yell out during the show. If you have something you want to say to me... This is what we do. We write it down and then you go outside in the lobby and then you go home and you f-yourself because, that's selfish. This is a rhetorical performance. It's got nothing to do with you. Don't text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don't keep telling people what you're doing."

- Louis C.K.

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"Drugs are so fucking good that they’ll ruin your life."

- Louis C.K.

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"I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school … Technical high school, that’s where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, “You can do anything you want.” Their whole lives. “You can do anything!” But this place, we take kids – they’re 15, they’re young – and we tell them, “You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you.”"

- Louis C.K.

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"My uncles were all funny. My dad wasn’t funny, but my uncles were all funny. Now I go back and I like him better than them, they were manipulative funny."

- Louis C.K.

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"I had to be the head of the household really for the first time and say okay, I have to actually make a rule that we’re going to live by here. And I decided what it was is that the family comes over the work always. I mean, with the kids it’s a priority. Because I wanted them to have a feeling like they could count on me like I was really there, I wasn’t just visiting. I didn’t want one of these moments like, “Jeez, honey, I’m sorry I’m not going to see you this week or this month or whatever because I’m going to LA.” I got some offers early that go out to LA and do parts on sitcoms and I said no, because it meant going and being away for a month."

- Louis C.K.

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"‘Fuck it.’ That’s really the attitude that’s keeps a family together. It’s not ‘We love each other!’ It’s ‘Fuck it.’"

- Louis C.K.

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"That’s what being a parent is like. It’s like Platoon."

- Louis C.K.

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"I remember the day I saw my hair was thinning. I don’t remember caring much. I don’t care. It’s just hair. It never bothered me much. I was pretty young, too. And it happened and is happening veeery slowly. I have a feeling dead people get really mad when we complain about losing hair."

- Louis C.K.

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"I’ve started to kind of hate people, and it’s not because I have anything against them. It’s just, I enjoy it. It’s recreation."

- Louis C.K.

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"It’s been a very old thing for people to gather together and laugh at stuff. The first comedian in America really was Abraham Lincoln … He used to go to a pub near where he lived and stand in front of the fire and he packed the place every night and he would just talk and bust everybody in their guts. He was just a hilarious speaker and that’s what he did."

- Louis C.K.

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"The Greatest Generation gets too much credit. Those World War II guys, if they had all the shit we have today, they’d be assholes too. It’s just circumstantial. It’s what you’re called on to do that makes you great. We haven’t been called on to do anything but buy shit and get fat."

- Louis C.K.

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"Friends should always tell you the truth. But please don’t."

- Louis C.K.

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"I’m a vulgar, fucked-up degenerate comedian who did drugs. And I’m connecting with Christian mothers and fathers. I love that. That means so much to me."

- Louis C.K.

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"The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby … I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don’t remember the first time I saw him."

- Louis C.K.

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"The last jobs I had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access TV station. As in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself."

- Louis C.K.

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"I’d love to have a shitty job. I couldn’t hold any down. Standup was the only thing I could stick with. I’m an idiot that way."

- Louis C.K.

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"Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people ’cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different … Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows."

- Louis C.K.

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"One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street … I was with a friend who said to me, “You just littered on the street! Don’t you care about the environment?” And I thought about it, and I said, “You know what? This in’t the environment. This is New York City … New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, [it’s] the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin’, stinkin’ piece of litter."

- Louis C.K.

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"Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars … If I had 90 billion dollars, I wouldn’t have it for long because I would just dream of all the crazy stuff I could do with it. This guy, 90 billion dollars. He could buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses and still have 88 billion dollars."

- Louis C.K.

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"To me, comedies are usually the least funny movies. Movies that are actually a comedy are usually not all that funny. To me Goodfellas and Raging Bull are two of the funniest movies I ever saw. [Vulture, 2010]"

- Louis C.K.

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"Whenever single people complain about anything, I really want them to shut the fuck up. First of all, if you’re single, your life has no consequence on the earth. Even if you’re helping people aggressively, which you’re fucking not, nobody gives a shit what happens to you. You can die, and it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Your mother will cry or whatever, but otherwise, nobody gives a shit."

- Louis C.K.

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"If you do something and people think you’re stupid, just go for crazy. You get more respect that way because nobody likes stupid people."

- Louis C.K.

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"Now we live in an amazing, amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots."

- Louis C.K.

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"Twitter and Facebook and MySpace; all that stuff makes you warped. We’ve all basically given ourselves data entry jobs. I’ve actually heard people say things like, “Aw shit, I have to update my Twitter.” Really? You have to? That’s a big priority for you?"

- Louis C.K.

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"People say ‘my phone sucks.’ No it doesn’t! The shittiest cellphone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks. Around the phone."

- Louis C.K.

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"There’s a huge amount of work that goes into placating a network in regular television. It’s literally 70% or 80% of your workload, is showing them the material, getting their notes and presenting it to them and making sure they weigh in. It’s a huge amount of work."

- Louis C.K.

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"I remember reading an article about Frasier when it was going off the air – a very sad obituary from a TV writer who said that Frasier was such a smart show, and it was for the Mensa set. And he gave an example, where he quoted some line about a woman that Frasier thinks is very mean and he says, “Her idea of tough love is the Spanish Inquisition.” And they thought that was very smart—just because he mentioned something from history."

- Louis C.K.

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"There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something."

- Louis C.K.

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"Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I’ve been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone’s dying, like laughing so they’re delirious. It’s like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean."

- Louis C.K.

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"I wish I could [keep a journal]. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something."

- Louis C.K.

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"I can’t sit down and write jokes. I just flows in from some maddeningly elusive place. Believe me, if I had an Alaska in my brain, I would drill baby drill, and I’d cum right on Sarah’s back while I was there."

- Louis C.K.

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"All these words we use, anybody can be a genius now. It used to be you had to have a thought no one ever had before or you had to invent a number. Now, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a cup in case we need another cup.” “Dude, you’re a genius!"

- Louis C.K.

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"Please stop it with voting for Trump. It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the 30s. Do you think they saw the shit coming? Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over."

- Louis C.K.

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"Trump is not your best. He's the worst of all of us. He's a symptom to a problem that is very real. But don't vote for your own cancer. You're better than that."

- Louis C.K.

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"Because we don't want the first bit of sad, we put it away with phone,*beep*, for the food, you get a little fell kind of. You're never feel completely sad or completely happy, just feel kind of satisfied with your product. And then you die."

- Louis C.K.

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"I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not."

- Louis C.K.

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"These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was O.K. because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."

- Louis C.K.

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"The hardest regret to live with is what you’ve done to hurt someone else. And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them."

- Louis C.K.

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"I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen. Thank you for reading."

- Louis C.K.

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"Saying that something is too terrible to joke about is like saying that a disease is too terrible to try to cure it."

- Louis C.K.

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"How many advantages can one person have? I'm a white man!"

- Louis C.K.

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"I don't have a gun, but if I did, I would shoot a baby deer in the mouth and feel nothing."

- Louis C.K.

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"Last week I got a flu that I caught, 'cause my daughter coughed &hellip; into my mouth."

- Louis C.K.

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"A man will cut your arm off and throw it in a river, but he'll leave you as a human being intact. He won't fuck with who you are. Women are non-violent, but they will shit inside of your heart."

- Louis C.K.

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"The meal is not over when I'm full. The meal is over when I hate myself."

- Louis C.K.

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"I'm buying a Cinnabon &hellip; at the airport &hellip; I arrived at. You understand why that's extra disgusting, right? Because when you're at the airport you're leaving from, you can say, "Oh, I gotta eat. I need some food, because I might be trapped in the sky forever, so I should eat right now." But I've landed. The trip is over. I'm 20 minutes from my house, where I got bananas and apples and shit. And I'm sitting on my luggage just fucking eating a Cinnabon with a fork and knife."

- Louis C.K.

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"When girls go wild, they show their tits to people. When women go wild, they kill men and drown their kids in a tub."

- Louis C.K.

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"Every day starts, my eyes open and I reload the program of misery. I open my eyes, remember who I am, what I'm like, and I just go, "Ugh" &hellip;""

- Louis C.K.

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"I finally have the body I want. It's easy, actually, you just have to want a really shitty body."

- Louis C.K.

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"I— finally, I have the body that I want, and that's a thing people really covet. It's a hard thing to achieve, and I did. And I'm going to tell you how to have exactly the body that you want. You just have to want a shitty body. That's all it is. You have to want your own shitty, ugly, disgusting body."

- Louis C.K.

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"If you're older, you're smarter. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen to 'em ... even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have."

- Louis C.K.

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"A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species' existence counts on them doing it. I don't know how they...how do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them. That's true! You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease."

- Louis C.K.

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"Why, even when I was innocent her hatred of me hurt a good deal. Now that I'm guilty, her belief in me would hurt even more."

- Garrett Fort

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"I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to—Well, we warned you."

- Garrett Fort

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"Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? You never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud, and what changes a darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things—what eternity is, for example—I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy."

- Garrett Fort

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"You do not quite get what I mean. Herr Frankenstein was interested only in human life. First to destroy it, then recreate it. There you have his mad dream."

- Garrett Fort

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"Look, it's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive. It's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive!"

- Garrett Fort

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"I made him with these hands, and with these hands I'll destroy him."

- Garrett Fort

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"You have created a monster and it will destroy you."

- Garrett Fort

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"The Abbey always reminds me of that old toast, 'Above lofty timbers, the walls around are bare, echoing to our laughter, as though the dead were there.'"

- Garrett Fort

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"They're all crazy. They're all crazy except you and me. Sometimes I have me doubts about you."

- Garrett Fort

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"I never drink...wine."

- Garrett Fort

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"I am Dracula.... I bid you welcome."

- Garrett Fort

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"Listen to them. Children of the night, what music they make."

- Garrett Fort

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"The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly. The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield."

- Garrett Fort

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"To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious.... There are far worse things awaiting man than death."

- Garrett Fort

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"The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."

- Garrett Fort

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"For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing."

- Garrett Fort

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"My mind is just as open as it ever was, professor. But it's a scientific mind, and there's no place in it for superstitions."

- Garrett Fort

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"Do you believe that the dead can influence the living?... Could you conceive of a superhuman mentality influencing someone from the other side of death?... There is such a one.... Someone, something that reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses."

- Garrett Fort

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"Possibly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your psychiatry, Mr. Garth."

- Garrett Fort

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"You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries."

- Garrett Fort

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"She was beautiful when she died—a hundred years ago."

- Garrett Fort

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"I'm not dead. A dim realization but an important one, because I should have died."

- Nick Sagan

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"I remember the shock and... ...and nothing. Just the shock."

- Nick Sagan

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"...bright like a fantastically annoying firefly. Was it a firefly? I couldn't see any wings. I took a step back. It floated forward. I thought: I am on some terrible drug."

- Nick Sagan

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"'Tell me who I am.' 'Halloween,' she said. I'd been rooting against it, but when the word came, it was almost a relief...Hell, I thought. A rose by any other name. 'And who is that?' 'You are my Lord Halloween, Prince of the Marshes, King of Kadath, High Sovereign of the Orange and Black.'"

- Nick Sagan

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"Why did it have to be ? Why couldn't it have been hypermnesia? Or ? Or hypochondria?"

- Nick Sagan

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"Children know precious little, but that profound ignorance comes from profound innocence. People really mean to say that innocence is bliss. And bliss is short-lived."

- Nick Sagan

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"He was the epitome of acting out to get attention. I think everyone acknowledged his jokes as a kind of defense mechanism. ('Humor? That's my lizard tail. You can look at that while I run away,' he'd once said.)"

- Nick Sagan

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"And love, with a cursive capital 'L,' is merely sleight of hand, doled out by genetic edict in order to keep DNA flowing. It's all genetics. And beyond that, it's all just zeros and ones. But friendship, with an unpretentious lowercase 'f,' is real and right and valuable."

- Nick Sagan

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"'I thought I put a stake through your heart,' he said. 'I don't hold a grudge,' shrugged Doom."

- Nick Sagan

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"Of course you think someone's trying to kill you, Hal--death is your favorite subject. Why shouldn't someone be trying to kill you?"

- Nick Sagan

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"...and he died for what?--what thrill?--what cause?--tell me what treasure is worth the oxygen in a good man's brain?"

- Nick Sagan

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"I felt like taking on the world. I felt more in control than I'd ever been. My partner in this endeavor: the psychotic who just broke my nose."

- Nick Sagan

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"I stood in the greeting-card aisle, looking for an appropriate sentiment. Though I searched high and low, there was no "so you're not even human" sympathy card."

- Nick Sagan

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"All hail the conquering hero. My best friend betrayed me, so I shot him. Distracted by a kiss, I let the love of my life die."

- Nick Sagan

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"Great heroes have Great horniness."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"You should feel what it is like to pleasure a falcon. You lock talons with her in the sky and do it while you both are falling like meteors. You would like it; they never complain if you come too fast."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it. If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil. If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape. If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions. All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not. May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them. May you find perfection, and know it by name."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't. Trust me, I was there. I know."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Moses should have said "Let my people go. Please.""

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"When the oil of the lamp is used up the wanker shall light his own way to salvation."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Fornication with your daughters thats like a double dog sin."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Your mother eats fungus from the feet of lepers."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Sin is moist make a mental note."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Oh to be young and in love (with 8 Chinese concubines)."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"This book you've read is just a story. I made it up. It is not designed to change anyone's beliefs or worldview, unless after reading it you've decided to be kinder to your fellow humans (which is okay), or you decide you really would like to teach yoga to an elephant, in which case, please get videotape."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"The Science you don't know looks like magic."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Regardless of its purpose, the humpback-whale song is the most complex piece of nonhuman composition on earth. Whether it's art, prayer, or booty call, the humpback song is an amazing thing to experience firsthand, and I suspect that even once the science of it is put to bed, it will remain, as long as they sing, magic."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Tension among a bunch of neurotics is just more interesting for a story than is a description of dedicated professionals doing their work and getting along, which is the case in reality. When in doubt, assume I made it up."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Heinous fuckery most foul!"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Fuckstockings!"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Said I, in perfect fucking French."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Gentle spook, if it is a warning you bring, state it true. If action you require, ask outright. If music you must make, play on- but by the wine-stained balls of Bacchus, speak your bloody business quick and clear and then be gone, before Time's iron tongue licks away my mercy bonk with second thoughts!"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"And once I shagged Regan on a platter of pork in front of Muslims."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"She's a bloody vision of loveliness."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"I shagged a ghost!"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"I fink I gots deaf on me willie."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"And so that is the story of how St. Rufus of Pipewrench was licked to death by marmots."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Fancy a spot of stony bonking before vespers?"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Mary: You can read? Pocket: I was raised in a nunnery, wench. I'm a walking library of learning bound in comely leather, suitable for stroking at your service, should you fancy a bit of culture to go with your lack of breeding...or vice verse of course."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Cordelia: You honor us, Fool. Did you hear rumors of small animals to hurt or were you hoping to accidentally surprise me in my bath again? Pocket: I was lost, Milady. Cordelia: A dozen times?"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"The Ghost: I'm sorry to haunt you while you're rogering the help. Pocket: The rogering has not commenced, wisp. I have barely bridled the horse for a moist and bawdy ride. Now, go away!"

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"King Lear: What is your name? Kent / Caius: Caius. King Lear: And whence do you hale? Kent / Caius: From Bonking, Sire. King Lear: Well, yes, lad as do we all."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"King Lear: How hath my fool offended? Regan: He hath shagged me roughly, against my will, and finished too soon. King Lear: By force- Pocket? He isn't eight-stone on a feast day- he couldn't shag a cat by force. Pocket: That's not true, sire. If the cat is distracted with a trout, then - well, uh, never mind."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Regan: Smell him. He reeks of sex, like fish and mushroom and sweat, doesn't he? Pocket: Aye, your honor, I'm sure I have an odor about me. I must confess, I was sans trou today in the kitchen, while awaiting my laundry. Bubble had left a casserole out on the floor to cool, and it did trip me and I fell prick-deep in gravy and goo- but I was on my way to chapel at the time. King Lear: [To Pocket] You put your dick in my lunch? King Lear: [to the bailiff] The fool put his dick in my lunch? Regan: No, in your beloved daughter. King Lear: Quiet, girl! Captain Curran, send a guard to watch the bread and the cheese before the fool has his way with it."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Pocket: Do you know that there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent? Kent: Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves. Pocket: Well, that's a scratchy spot of cat wank. But bloody well said."

- Christopher Moore (author)

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"Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Never again to wiggle your toes. What a hell of a thing, what a wonderful, beautiful thing, to wiggle your toes."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Did anybody ever come back from the dead, any single one of the millions who got killed, did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say i like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me i’m dead but i died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here i am, i’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy, see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?"

- Dalton Trumbo

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"No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty — what did he mean next time? There wasn't going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said "let's fight for liberty", he would say mister my life is important. I'm not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I've got to know in advance what liberty is, and whose idea of liberty we're talking about and just how much of that liberty we're going to have. And what's more mister — are you as much interested in liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you're a goddamn fourflusher talking through your hat, and I've already decided that I like the liberty I've got right here. The liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girl. I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won't get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me, I don't care for some."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"There's nothing noble about dying. Not even if you die for honor. Not even if you die the greatest hero the world ever saw. Not even if you're so great your name will never be forgotten and who's that great? The most important thing is your life, little guys. You're worth nothing dead except for speeches. Don't let them kid you any more. Pay no attention when they tap you on the shoulder and say come along we've got to fight for liberty, or whatever their word is. There's always a word."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Just say "mister I'm sorry, I got no time to die, I'm too busy" and then turn and run like hell. If they say coward why don't pay any attention because it's your job to live not to die. If they talk about dying for principles that are bigger than life, you say "mister you're a liar. Nothing is bigger than life". There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about lying in the ground and rotting? What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead? Because when you're dead, mister, it's all over. It's the end. You're less than a dog, less than a rat, less than a bee or an ant, less than a white maggot crawling around on a dungheap. You're dead, mister, and you died for nothing."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Inside me I'm screaming, nobody pays any attention. If I had arms, I could kill myself. If I had legs, I could run away. If I had a voice, I could talk and be some kind of company for myself. I could yell for help, but nobody would help me."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots, you fierce ones, you spawners of hate, you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives. We are men of peace, we are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace, if you take away our work, if you try to range us one against the other, we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us, we will use them to defend our very lives, and the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now we have seen it and we know it."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one, not ten, not ten thousand, not a million, not ten millions, not a hundred millions but a billion, two billions of us all — the people of the world. We will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it, we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquillity, in security, in decency, in peace. You plan the wars, you masters of men — plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun."

- Dalton Trumbo

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"I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This committee is on trial here before the American people. Let us get that straight."

- John Howard Lawson

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"You believe in freedom of speech for communists because what they say is true. You do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists because what they say is a lie."

- John Howard Lawson

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"I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous, everyone hasn't met me yet."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"There goes the neighborhood."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"If all goes well, about a week. If not, about an hour and a half."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"In my life I've been through plenty. when I was three years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they got rid of me."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol' man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. He told me to keep out of those places."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"When I was a kid, I never went to Disneyland. My ol' man told me Mickey Mouse died in a cancer experiment."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me... and no one showed up."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I like to date schoolteachers. If you do something wrong, they make you do it over again."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"My old man never liked me. He gave me my allowance in traveler's checks."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"A homeless guy came up to me on the street, said he hadn't eaten in four days. I told him, "Man, I wish I had your willpower.""

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I tell ya, I grew up in a tough neighborhood. The other night a guy pulled a knife on me. I could see it wasn't a real professional job. There was butter on it."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I was an ugly kid. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I get."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I tell ya, my wife's a lousy cook. After dinner, I don't brush my teeth. I count them."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She said she liked me as a friend."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I tell ya, my family were always big drinkers. When I was a kid, I was missing. They put my picture on a bottle of Scotch."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I tell ya, my wife likes to talk during sex. Last night, she called me from a motel."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt — for obvious reasons — that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came back my catch phrase was "nothing goes right." Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"Why, that's the story of my life--no respect; I mean, I don't get no respect at all!"

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"The killers are wanted in all 50 states."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"I was so ugly... When I was born, the doctor slapped my mother!"

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"...in Dangerfield, there has always been something else in addition to the comedian. This is a man who has failed at everything, even comedy. Rodney Dangerfield is his third name in show business; he flopped under two earlier names as well as his real name. Who is really at home inside that red, sweating face and that knowing leer? The most interesting thing about "Back to School," which is otherwise a pleasant but routine comedy, is the puzzle of Rodney Dangerfield. Here is a man who reminds us of some of the great comedians of the early days of the talkies - of Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields - because, like them, he projects a certain mystery. Marx and Fields were never just being funny. There was the sense that they were getting even for hurts so deep that all they could do was laugh about them. It's the same with Dangerfield."

- Rodney Dangerfield

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"For Beatrice--Darling, dearest, dead."

- Daniel Handler

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"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."

- Daniel Handler

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"Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"When you were very small, perhaps someone read to you the insipid story —the word "insipid" here means "not worth reading to someone" of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. A very dull boy, you may remember, cried "Wolf!" when there was no wolf, and the gullible villagers ran to rescue him only to find the whole thing was a joke. Then he cried "Wolf!" when it wasn't a joke, and the villagers didn't come running, and the boy was eaten and the story, thank goodness, was over. The story's moral, of course, ought to be "Never live somewhere where wolves are running around loose," but whoever read you the story probably told you that the moral was not to lie. This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie. For example, it was perfectly appropriate, after Violet left the Reptile Room, for Sunny to crawl over to the cage that held the Incredibly Deadly Viper, unlatch the cage, and begin screaming as loudly as she could even though nothing was really wrong."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice--I would much prefer it if you were alive and well."

- Daniel Handler

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"Violet: You are being unbearable, with a U!"

- Daniel Handler

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"Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"There are few sights sadder than a ruined book. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and would never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but fear of realtors is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I'm sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"To Beatrice--My love flew like a butterfly, Until death swooped down like a bat, As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: That's the end of that."

- Daniel Handler

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"I’m sure you have heard it said that appearance does not matter so much and that it is what's on the inside that counts. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because if it were true then people who were good on the inside would never have to comb their hair or take a bath, and the whole world would smell even worse than it already does. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is 'Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand". -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Dear Reader,"

- Daniel Handler

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"I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this book because you are in the mood for a pleasant experience. If this is the case, I advise you to put this book down instantaneously, because of all the books describing the unhappy lives of the Baudelaire orphans, The Miserable Mill might be the unhappiest yet. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are sent to Paltryville to work in a lumber mill, and they find disaster and misfortune lurking behind every log."

- Daniel Handler

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"The pages of this book, I'm sorry to inform you, contain such unpleasantries as a giant pincer machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident resulting in injury, and coupons."

- Daniel Handler

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"I have promised to write down the entire history of these three poor children, but you haven't, so if you prefer stories that are more heartwarming, please feel free to make another selection."

- Daniel Handler

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"With all due respect,"

- Daniel Handler

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"Klaus: Yes, sir."

- Daniel Handler

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"Violet: Sir?"

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice--You will always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave. -Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Get out of my way, you cakesniffers! -Carmelita Spats"

- Daniel Handler

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"Shyness is a very curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people are any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down."

- Daniel Handler

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"The expression "Making a mountain out of a molehill" simply means making a big deal out of something that is actually a small deal, and it is easy to see how this expression came about. Molehills are simply mounds of earth serving as condominiums for moles, and they have never caused anyone harm except for maybe a stubbed toe if you were walking around the wilderness without any shoes on. Mountains, however, are very large mounds of earth and are constantly causing problems. They are very tall, and when people try to climb them they often fall off, or get lost and die of starvation. Sometimes, two countries fight over who really owns a mountain, and thousands of people have to go to war and come home grumpy or wounded. And, of course, mountains serve as homes to mountain goats and mountain lions, who enjoy attacking helpless picnickers and eating sandwiches or children. So when someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, they are pretending that something is as horrible as a war or a ruined picnic when it is really only as horrible as a stubbed toe."

- Daniel Handler

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"Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make--bombs for instance, or strawberry shortcake--if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it has floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you'd made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning."

- Daniel Handler

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"If you are looking for a story about cheerful youngsters spending a jolly time at boarding school, look elsewhere. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent and resourceful children, and you might expect that they would do very well at school. Don't. For the Baudelaires, school turns out to be another miserable episode in their unlucky lives."

- Daniel Handler

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"Truth be told, within the chapters that make up this dreadful story, the children will face snapping crabs, strict punishments, dripping fungus, comprehensive exams, violin recitals, S.O.R.E., and the metric system. Most of all The worst thing that can happen to their friends, (Quagmires)"

- Daniel Handler

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"It is my solemn duty to stay up all night researching and writing the history of these three hapless youngsters, but you may be more comfortable getting a good night's sleep. In that case, you should probably choose some other book."

- Daniel Handler

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"Klaus: Maybe I don't know what "cakesniffer" means, but I think I can translate our new school's motto... If I'm not mistaken, "Memento Mori" means "Remember you will die"."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice--When we met, my life began. Soon afterward, yours ended"

- Daniel Handler

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"The world 'bubble' is in the dictionary, as is the word 'peacock,' the word 'vacation,' and the words 'the,' 'author's,' 'execution,' 'has,' 'been,' 'canceled,' which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear. So, if you were to read the dictionary, rather than this book, you could skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' and read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night, weeping and tearing your hair out. But this book is not a dictionary, and if you were to skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' you would be skipping the most pleasant parts of the entire story. Nowhere in this book will you find the words 'bubble,' 'peacock,' 'vacation,' or, unfortunately for me, anything about an execution being canceled."

- Daniel Handler

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"If you were to take a plastic bag and place it inside a large bowl, and then, using a wooden spoon, stir the bag around, you could use the expression 'a mixed bag' to describe what you had in front of you, but you would not be using the expression in the same way I am about to use it now. Although 'a mixed bag' sometimes refers to a plastic bag that has been stirred in a bowl, more often, it is used to describe a situation that has both good parts and bad parts. An afternoon movie theater, for example, would be a mixed bag if your favorite movie were showing, but if you had to eat gravel instead of popcorn. A trip to the zoo would be a very mixed bag if the weather were beautiful, but all the man and woman-eating lions were running around loose."

- Daniel Handler

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"If you are ever forced to take a chemistry class, you will probably see, at the front of the classroom, a large chart divided into squares, with different numbers and letters in each of them. This chart is called the table of elements, and scientists like to say that it contains all the substances that make up our world. Like everyone else, scientists are wrong from time to time, and it is easy to see that they are wrong about the table of elements. Because although this table contains a great many elements, from the element oxygen, which is found in the air, to the element of aluminum, which is found in cans of soda, the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise. The element of surprise is not a gas like oxygen, or a solid, like aluminum. The element of surprise is an unfair advantage, and it can be found in situations in which one person has sneaked up on another. The surprised person - or, in this sad case, the surprised person - are too stunned to defend themselves and the sneaky person has the advantage of the element of surprise."

- Daniel Handler

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"As the official representative of Lemony Snicket in all legal, literary, and social matters, I am often asked difficult questions, even when I am in a hurry. Recently, the most common questions have been the following:"

- Daniel Handler

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"Dear Diary,"

- Daniel Handler

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"I didn't realize this was a sad occasion. — The waiter at The Anxious Clown Restaurant"

- Daniel Handler

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"Why do so many things end in fire?"

- Daniel Handler

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"What can be hidden in a book?"

- Daniel Handler

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"On the day you officially join the organization, you will hear a noise outside your home. It may sound like the howl of a wolf, the chirping of a cricket, the engine of an automobile, the keys of a typewriter, the striking of a match, or the turning of a page. The noise will come in the middle of the night, the middle of the morning, or, in very rare cases, late in the afternoon. Ask your parents what the noise was. If they reply 'nothing,' they are replying in code, because there is never 'nothing' outside one's home. If you are interested in volunteering, answer your parents with the following question: 'If there's nothing out there, what was that noise?' We will be listening and will know it is safe to act. — V.F.D."

- Daniel Handler

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"As the aphorism says, If you have to ask, you can't afford it."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice--When we were together I felt breathless. Now, you are.-Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of ‘systematically assisting Sisyphus’s stealthy, Syst-susceptible sister,’ which is easier done than said. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read. For instance, if you are walking in the mountains, and you don't read the sign that says "Beware of Cliff" because you were busy reading a joke book instead, you may suddenly find yourself walking on air rather than on a sturdy bed of rocks. If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled "How to Build a Chair" instead of a cookbook, your pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling. And if you insist on reading this book instead of something more cheerful, you will most certainly find yourself moaning in despair instead of wriggling with delight, so if you have any sense at all you will put this book down and pick up another one. I know of a book, for instance, called The Littlest Elf, which tells the story of a teensy-weensy little man who scurries around fairyland having all sorts of adorable adventures, and you can see at once that you should probably read The Littlest Elf and wriggle over the lovely things that happened to this imaginary creature in a made-up place, instead of reading this book and moaning over the terrible things that have happened to the three Baudelaire orphans. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"When you traveling by bus, it is always difficult to decide whether you should sit in a seat by the window, a seat on the aisle, or a seat in the middle. If you take an aisle seat, you have the advantage of being able to stretch your legs whenever you like, but you have the disadvantage of people walking by you, and they can accidentally step on your toes or spill something on your clothing. If you take a window seat, you have the advantage of getting a clear view of the scenery, but you have the disadvantage of watching insects die as they hit the glass. If you take the middle seat, you have neither of these advantages, and you have the added disadvantage of people leaning all over you when they fall asleep. You can see at once why you should always hire a limousine or rent a mule rather than take the bus to your destination. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Although "jumping to conclusions" is an expression, rather than an activity, it is as dangerous as jumping off a cliff, jumping in front of a moving train, and jumping for joy. If you jump off a cliff, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful landing unless there is something below you to cushion your fall, such as a body of water or an immense pile of tissue paper. If you jump in front of a moving train, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful voyage unless you are wearing some sort of train-proof suit. And if you jump for joy, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful bump on the head, unless you make sure you are standing someplace with very high ceilings, which joyous people rarely do. Clearly, the solution to anything involving jumping is either to make sure you are jumping to a safe place, or not to jump at all. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"In this large and fierce world of ours, there are many, many unpleasant places to be. You can be in a river swarming with angry electric eels, or in a supermarket filled with vicious long-distance runners. You can be in a hotel that has no room service, or you can be lost in a forest that is slowly filling up with water. You can be in a hornet's nest or in an abandoned airport or the office of a pediatric surgeon, but one of the most unpleasant things that can happen is to find yourself in a quandary. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion--which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea--you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset and find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"A cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still life. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant. - Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice--Summers without you are as cold as winter. Winters without you are even colder.-Lemony Snicket"

- Daniel Handler

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"If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you."

- Daniel Handler

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"Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "no news is bad news," except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "no news is no news," except that it is so obvious that it is hardly an expression at all."

- Daniel Handler

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"At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidopterist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens."

- Daniel Handler

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"Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with "Once upon a time," and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase "happily ever after.""

- Daniel Handler

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"There are many things in this world I do not know. I do not know how butterflies get out of their cocoons without damaging their wings. I do not know why anyone would boil vegetables when roasting them is much tastier. I do not know how to make olive oil, and I do not know why dogs bark before an earthquake, and I do not know why some people voluntarily choose to climb mountains where it is freezing and difficult to breathe or live in the suburbs, where the coffee is watery and all of the houses look alike."

- Daniel Handler

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"Because of the information discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice— Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours."

- Daniel Handler

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"The sad truth is that the truth is sad."

- Daniel Handler

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"It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you."

- Daniel Handler

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"One of the most troublesome things in life is that what you do or do not want has very little to do with what does or does not happen."

- Daniel Handler

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"Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from, or how often they should appear."

- Daniel Handler

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"Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family has betrayed you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview. It is very nerve-wracking to explain to someone all the things you can do in the hopes that they will pay you to do them. I once had a very difficult job interview in which I had not only to explain that I could hit an olive with a bow and arrow, memorize up to three pages of poetry, and determine if there was poison mixed into cheese fondue without tasting it, but I had to demonstrate all these things as well. In most cases, the best strategy for a job interview is to be fairly honest, because the worst thing that can happen is that you won't get the job and will spend the rest of your life foraging for food in the wilderness and seeking shelter underneath a tree or the awning of a bowling alley that has gone out of business, but in the case of the Baudelaire orphans' job interview with Madame Lulu, the situation was much more desperate. They could not be honest at all, because they were disguised as entirely different people, and the worst thing that could happen was being discovered by Count Olaf and his troupe and spending the rest of their lives in circumstances so terrible that the children could not bear to think of them."

- Daniel Handler

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"The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the sinister mystery that surrounds them..."

- Daniel Handler

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"With the Baudelaire orphans, it was as if their grief were a very heavy object that they each took turns carrying so that they would not all be crying at once, but sometimes the object was too heavy for one of them to move without weeping, so Violet and Sunny stood next to Klaus, reminding him that this was something they could all carry together until at last, they found a safe place to lay it down."

- Daniel Handler

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"The world is a harum-scarum place." "Harum?" Sunny asked. It's complicated and confusing," Olivia explained. They say that long ago it was simple and quiet, but that might be a legend."

- Daniel Handler

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"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."

- Daniel Handler

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"Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do it makes you want to hide under the coffee table."

- Daniel Handler

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"Like handshakes, house pets, or raw carrots, many things are preferable when not slippery. Unfortunately, in this miserable volume, I am afraid that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire run into more than their fair share of slipperiness during their harrowing journey up -- and down -- a range of strange and distressing mountains."

- Daniel Handler

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"In order to spare you any further repulsion, it would be best not to mention any of the unpleasant details of this story, particularly a secret message, a toboggan, a deceitful trap, a swarm of snow gnats, a scheming villain, a troupe of organized youngsters, a covered casserole dish, and a surprising survivor of a terrible fire."

- Daniel Handler

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"Unfortunately, I have dedicated my life to researching and recording the sad tale of the Baudelaire Orphans. There is no reason for you to dedicate yourself to such things, and you might instead dedicate yourself to letting this slippery book slip from your hands into a nearby trash receptacle, or deep pit."

- Daniel Handler

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"Violet said..."We've never known anyone who could remain so cheerful, no matter what terrible things occurred."

- Daniel Handler

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"To tell you the truth, I sometimes find it a bit tiresome," Fiona said..."

- Daniel Handler

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"My stepfather said that the amount of treachery in this world is enormous and that the best we could do was one small noble thing."

- Daniel Handler

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"Why, you're all grown up! The last time I saw you I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!"

- Daniel Handler

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"People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said. They're like chef's salad, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."

- Daniel Handler

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"As the hook-handed man circled the brig, it was as if the Baudelaires were picking through a chef's salad consisting mostly of dreadful- and perhaps even poisonous- ingredients, trying desperately to find the one noble crouton that might save their sister..."

- Daniel Handler

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"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) When you are invited to dine, particularly with people you do not know very well, it always helps to have a conversational opener, a phrase which here means "an interesting sentence to say out loud in order to get people talking." Although lately, it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca, I keep a list of good and bad conversational openers in my commonplace book in order to avoid awkward pauses at the dinner table. "Who would like to see an assortment of photographs taken while I was on vacation?" for instance, is a very poor conversational opener because it is likely to make your fellow diners shudder instead of talk, whereas good conversational openers are sentences such as "What would drive a man to commit arson?," "Why do so many stories of true love end in tragedy and despair?," and "Madam DeLustrio, I believe I've discovered your true identity!" all of which are likely to provoke discussions, arguments, and accusations, thus making the dinner party much more entertaining."

- Daniel Handler

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"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage."

- Daniel Handler

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"I'm happier than a pig eating bacon!" Count Olaf cried. "I'm tickled pinker than a sun-burned Caucasian! I'm in higher spirits than a brand-new graveyard! I'm so happy-go-lucky that lucky and happy people are going to beat me with sticks out of pure, unbridled jealousy!"

- Daniel Handler

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"There is evil out there you cannot even imagine. -Captain Widdershins"

- Daniel Handler

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"C is for Cute A is for Adorable R is for Ravishing M is for Gorgeous E is for Excellent L is for Lovable I is for I'm the best! T is for Talented A is for "A tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian! NOW LET'S START MY WHOLE WONDERFUL SONG ALL OVER AGAIN!"

- Daniel Handler

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"Carmelita Spats, who oughtta be told "Gorgeous" does not start with an M."

- Daniel Handler

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"I can't stand the lyrics."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice— No one could extinguish my love, or your house."

- Daniel Handler

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"Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. Who knows when some slight shock, he asks, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?"

- Daniel Handler

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"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life."

- Daniel Handler

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"The name John Godfrey Saxe is not likely to mean anything to you, unless you are a fan of American humorist poets of the nineteenth century. There are not many such people in the world, but the Baudelaires' father was one of them, and had several poems committed to memory. From time to time he would get into a whimsical mood-the word "whimsical," as you probably know, means "odd and impulsive"-and would grab the nearest Baudelaire child, bounce him or her up and down on his lap, and recite a poem by John Godfrey Saxe about an elephant. In the poem, six blind men encountered an elephant for the first time and were unable to agree on what the animal was like. The first man felt the tall, smooth side of the elephant, and concluded that an elephant was like a wall. The second man felt the tusk of the elephant, and decided that an elephant resembled a spear. The third man felt the trunk of the elephant, and the fourth felt one of the elephant's legs, and so on and so on, with all of the blind men bickering over what an elephant is like. As with many children, Violet and Klaus had grown old enough to find their father's whimsical moods a little embarrassing, so Sunny had become the primary audience for Mr. Baudelaire's poetry recital, and remembered the poem best."

- Daniel Handler

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"Burn down hotel! Sunny said."

- Daniel Handler

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"Never mind what you were doing, Olaf said. You're fired! You can't fire me! Esme growled. I quit! Well, you can leave by mutual agreement, Olaf grumbled and then with another succinct Ha! he lifted the harpoon gun and pointed it at Dewey Denouement."

- Daniel Handler

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"I'll have ten grams of rice, Mrs. Bass interrupted, one tenth of a hectogram of shrimp vindaloo, a dekagram of chana aloo masala, one thousand centigrams of tandori salmon, four samosas with surface area of nineteen cubic centimeters, five deciliters of mango lassi, and a sada rava dosai that's exactly nineteen centimeters long."

- Daniel Handler

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"The last safe place is safe no more."

- Daniel Handler

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"For Beatrice — I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished"

- Daniel Handler

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"If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans—and I certainly hope you have not—then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repair people in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that left the Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res— a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative"—and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now."

- Daniel Handler

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"I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table."

- Daniel Handler

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"I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture."

- Daniel Handler

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"I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms."

- Daniel Handler

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"I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see."

- Daniel Handler

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"Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner."

- Daniel Handler

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"The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from its surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street and why wouldn't you pick it up if it appeared in a taxi cab."

- Daniel Handler

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"I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING."

- Daniel Handler

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"If i were a little braver i would have asked her something like, "Do you think Kickass: the movie is a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation and it would lead to other conversations during the flat and lonely times."

- Daniel Handler

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"Standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in, where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have to lovely things next to each other."

- Daniel Handler

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"Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape."

- Daniel Handler

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"This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys."

- Daniel Handler

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"Money money money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf."

- Daniel Handler

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"This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says."

- Daniel Handler

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"… the point is, why is there cruelty? Why do people ask other people to do impossible things? why behave this way? why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?"

- Daniel Handler

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""I love you, too" David said and took the bottle. "I want you to love me in particular," Helena said"

- Daniel Handler

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"It's always dawnest before dark"

- Daniel Handler

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"I'm full of hard times today"

- Daniel Handler

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"The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights."

- Daniel Handler

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"What a bad day it was, the clouds were low and cloudy, the rain no fun, and the dark as it hit the late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won't leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself over everything."

- Daniel Handler

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"This was that day if you know what I mean."

- Daniel Handler

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"It was a bad day for love."

- Daniel Handler

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"The rain, the rain, the rain. You can't even hear it outside the window but still it's a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flower, and so many grade school teachers are single."

- Daniel Handler

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"She said, "We're detectives" in the tone of voice that someone might say, "Making you happy isn't making me happy""

- Daniel Handler

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"They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a cone of frost."

- Daniel Handler

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"All love gets over, and we must get over it."

- Daniel Handler

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"Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean."

- Daniel Handler

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"Mike could see the fellow cooked and ate and sat on a sofa and put his feet up on the table it magazines. Mike didn't care which ones the fellow subscribed to, because Mike had subscribed to the fellow."

- Daniel Handler

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"This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love."

- Daniel Handler

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"I find you interesting, Joe, so nearly everything you say will be interesting too. I love you. I could say I'm lonely but that's not the only reason."

- Daniel Handler

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"I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me."

- Daniel Handler

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"[she] gave me a puzzled frown like she thought offhand i was dead but the media's so unreliable these days."

- Daniel Handler

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"That's always where the love goes, with somebody else away from me."

- Daniel Handler

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"All four of them have completely abandoned one another."

- Daniel Handler

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"Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn't worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that Tomas in Eddie's stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man."

- Daniel Handler

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"It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. "We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans." Is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park."

- Daniel Handler

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"Dear Joe The letter said The windows rattle without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wild scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep on doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment."

- Daniel Handler

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"Yeah, I have a question," said the guy with the wicked eyes... "My question is, I quit. I'm going to quit."

- Daniel Handler

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"What he'd just said was "Who cares?" and nobody wants to hear that."

- Daniel Handler

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"South San Francisco The Industrial City is ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact."

- Daniel Handler

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"He's been misled and he's been afraid. He's been hit in the head and left for dead. He's been abused and he's been accused and he's been refused a piece of bread. On and on he goes down this road getting pushed around and lost and around and given until sundown to get out of town, and yet this is basically a love song. He's had the shit kicked out of him, and guess what? It's love."

- Daniel Handler

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"When I was crazy." the radio explained, "I thought you were great."

- Daniel Handler

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"Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening."

- Daniel Handler

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"If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. it is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe."

- Daniel Handler

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""I know" Helena said and this is another example of why behave this way? Things just poured out of her mouth lately, like vomit, and sometimes it actually was."

- Daniel Handler

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"They are all one, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers and either way things turn out such that nothing you've ever heard is ever any help."

- Daniel Handler

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""Instead of change, please give me gun so i can shoot you." She is soft-spoken but short and full of rage lately, like her whole life."

- Daniel Handler

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"He bought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn't see anyone, and the whole thing was a secret bird... Everything he said was tinged with the unreadability of someone who would bring a bird on cruise ship."

- Daniel Handler

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""Oh my god!" Hillary is standing in the doorway of the bathroom of the bathroom which on one had is surprising but there's the other hand, too."

- Daniel Handler

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""Help me," Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away."

- Daniel Handler

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"Over the years they had developed a layer of sincerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich."

- Daniel Handler

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"Wedding after wedding after wedding and then yours - your wedding? Would that make you what they're now calling happy?"

- Daniel Handler

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"God, or somebody, what is it with terrible things? If you made this world why not a better one?"

- Daniel Handler

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"judgmentally, judgmentally, judgmentally I would believe in you and sword fight others who did not, any necessary sacrifice if you were in the mood for that."

- Daniel Handler

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"They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay."

- Daniel Handler

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"If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable. In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes."

- Daniel Handler

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"Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out, I can be king of Olaf-Land, and you three can be my new henchfolk."

- Daniel Handler

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"Friday: Baudelaires, please come with me. Olaf: What about me? Friday: Go away."

- Daniel Handler

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"Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park."

- Daniel Handler

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"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."

- Daniel Handler

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"Olaf: I'm a genius! I've solved all of our problems! Look! Violet: Renaming the boat doesn't solve any of our problems."

- Daniel Handler

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"Halloween seems to last forever, until it is finally time to put on one's costume and demand candy from strangers."

- Daniel Handler

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"Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage…Like two out of every ten couples."

- Neil Simon

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"And so she lived ... hopefully ... ever after."

- Neil Simon

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"Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money."

- Neil Simon

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"You're welcome to take a bath. You look like the second week of the garbage strike."

- Neil Simon

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"If I had to make one comparison, I'd say that when it's five below in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles, and when it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles; but there are 2,000,000 interesting people in New York–and only 78 in Los Angeles. There may be a hell of a lot more, but it's hard to find them."

- Neil Simon

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"People with honorary awards are looked upon with disfavor. Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your brand-new Mercedes?"

- Neil Simon

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"Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life."

- Neil Simon

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"A writer without confidence is like a metaphor without something to compare itself to."

- Neil Simon

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"If you can go through life without ever experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet. And if you've gone through pain and think you know exactly why, you haven't examined all the options."

- Neil Simon

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"Neil Simon strikes me less as the new Moliere than as a rattier Rattigan."

- Neil Simon

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"I believe in the vast potentialities of mankind. But I see everywhere a wide disparity between what they can be and what they are. That is what I want to say in writing. I want to say the genius of the human race is mongrelized; I want to find out how mankind can be helped out of the animal kingdom into the clear sweet air."

- Clifford Odets

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"Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills."

- Clifford Odets

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"Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries."

- Clifford Odets

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"...life is lonely, life is empty. Love isn't everything. A dear true friend is more than love--the serge outlasts the silk."

- Clifford Odets

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"At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don’t really think of myself as "writing humor." I’m simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. Here’s the thing. Most of what we witness in life is too complex to take in whole. Because of this we unconsciously edit what we see, select what to really record and what to ignore, which is why people who look at the same thing don’t necessarily see the same thing...Comic writers don’t so much invent funny things as strip away the distractions, the impediments to laughter."

- Richard Russo

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"I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic’s best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he’s doing is easy is an occupational hazard. Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming? In "serious" fiction (as in "serious" film) you can feel the weight of the material. You expect to see the effort and the strain of all that heavy lifting, and we reward the effort as much as the success. Comedy is often just as serious, and to ignore that seriousness is misguided, of course, but most writers with comic world views have accustomed themselves to being sold at a discount. Most of us wouldn’t have it any other way."

- Richard Russo

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"When I went to Spain, right after the Pulitzer I encountered Spanish journalists who are very different from American journalists. One way is that they are all very political. They want their writers to be very political. The first journalist that I met when I was there asked "Are you going to use your prize for political purposes?" I said, "Good Lord, no, I wouldn’t trade on it—I’m a professional liar. I tell stories. I make things up." They were appalled. They made it very clear to me that that was the wrong answer and that it was further evidence of what was wrong with American authors and Americans, in general, was that we were insular. Which we are. And that we were not bearing our responsibilities in the world. And that fame that is ours has been wasted on people like us because we won’t use it for good purposes. American writers are probably far more insular than we should be, nevertheless I am very much of the other persuasion. That people should not talk about what they don’t know."

- Richard Russo

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"Harold and I tried to plant new trees, but they won't take because of the roots. You got to dig up the old stumps and they go way down. It cost a lot and the roots go everywhere. Under the streets and the lawns. We got them in our cellar. And you seen the sidewalks." I said I had. "You'd like to plant a tree or two, but where?" "The roots will die eventually," I said, trying to be optimistic, since she really wanted to plant trees. "That's what I said. Harold says no. He says they just petrify there in the ground, making it impossible for anything alive to find root and grab ahold. 'Course Harold is a sourpuss. I think sometimes he just says things like that so he won't have to go out and try. Some people would rather do without trees than dig a little hole."

- Richard Russo

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"Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, "I just want to be entertained." This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means we shouldn't go to movies together."

- Richard Russo

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"Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action."

- Richard Russo

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"One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding."

- Richard Russo

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"The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds."

- Richard Russo

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"That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears."

- Richard Russo

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"The first documentary I saw as a child was Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) broadcast one Sunday afternoon. Nanook enchanted me by his courage to smile in a frozen wasteland, and by the simple fact that he wore a fur coat rather than a military uniform: this gentle hunter wasn’t a conqueror. Later, I understood how great Flaherty was: he told a timeless story without using commentary or pedagogues, and he didn’t interview Nanook like a celebrity or an aggressive talk-show host. He remained off-screen, observing and listening to create that exceptional complicity we feel in this documentary that eschews didacticism. The emotion of life found its counterpart in the emotion of art - a rare and precious achievement in a genre that is often limited to the emotion of the informational narrative."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"One of the key topics, for me, is a study of the individual in relation to crowds and to power. A film essay on crowd psychology would avoid commentary (it has become the madness of secondary discourse in many documentaries) and rely wholly on sound and image. Ideally, it would try to provide us with new concepts on the nature of society, on violence, and on the political bestiality of our times that is linked to the way the media has become a plague of words and images stripped of substance. It is a plague infecting our lives and, as a consequence, the history of nations with all that is sensational, random, and confused."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"Fellini was a hugely original spirit, a bona fide gagman, the king of contradiction, a well-oiled motor mouth -- in short, anything except a thinker. He needed the interviews and the media because it was during these seeming exercises in vanity that he discovered things about himself. If you pushed him hard enough, he would come up with ideas that surprised even him."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"Fellini was a man of many selves and contradictions: he quoted Dante with genuine emotion while executing pornographic doodles on the table napkin then balked at paying the lunch bill while handing out millions of lire to the beggars of Rome. Although he boasted he was heterosexual, he nonetheless directed one of the greatest bisexual films of all time. He was Mr. Cool as well as the Nutty Professor. He contains multitudes and the journey to his center never ceases. Quite simply, you end up cherishing an Onion Man with no center. Federico really had a rough time of it but pretended otherwise and had the grace never to expose his personal problems in public. And then there are the films that continuously generate new meanings. For example, 8 1/2 contains alembicated allusions to Hamlet of tremendous power and beauty that resonate in the mind long after the film is over."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"Without once compromising his artistic integrity, Fellini imagined a body of work -- as opposed to a suite of spin-offs, remakes, potboilers and so on -- where each production can be ranked as among the finest of experimental films ever to reach and influence an international public. There is a breathtaking scope to that achievement and great courage in the process: surmounting unbelievable resistance from producers, enemies of all kinds and jealous colleagues, career reversals, and poor health, Fellini held true to his own vision of cinema forged in the smithy of his soul."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"Italo Calvino said the artist reveals that bit of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. Art is all about the art of lying. The artist’s imperative is to create a supreme fiction, a lie that, paradoxically, discloses a truth. It's precisely this kind of paradox that Calvino and Fellini adored."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"I don’t like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"In a synchronistic way, the Jungian term of great significance for Carolyn Carlson, her art is in accord with Hölderlin's phrase, "Poetically, man dwells on this earth." After the century of Fascism, we enter the brave new world of the digital era where bombs are grafted inside the body in a corruption of the word spiritual that Malraux never imagined. For Carlson, the question is no longer, "How to live together?" but rather, "How to live poetically our dwelling place?""

- Damian Pettigrew

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"The single greatest influence on my work as a filmmaker has been the celebrated Interviews with Francis Bacon (1980) by David Sylvester. Sylvester is a master of the art of complicity: he knows how to manipulate and exploit it. Complicity requires being cautiously intellectual yet profoundly human in the sense that the interviewer must act as the concerned midwife, allowing the interviewee to express himself while at the same time guiding his thoughts to a satisfactory conclusion through sensitive provocation."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"The filmed interview is an art extemporized under difficult conditions and successful only when the interviewee hasn't prepared his replies beforehand."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"Fellini has sometimes been accused of not being interested in the work of other directors but I never found this accusation to hold true. The Federico I knew was not only a voracious reader but extremely interested in hearing about international directors, most notably, Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Akira Kurosawa, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. Clearly, part of the pleasure of discussing these directors was the stimulus for new ideas that their latest films gave him. Although we never explored Portuguese film in any depth, the films of Manoel de Oliveira and Joao César Monteiro genuinely fascinated Federico. At the urging of Mastroianni, he went to see A Divina Comédia (1991), Oliveira’s superb allegory about Western civilization, and returned enthralled. He had long been obsessed by the theme of insane asylums and Oliveira’s masterful blend of philosophy and religion appealed to him at a time in his life when such questions as death and resurrection had become pressing concerns. I do not know where or in what format Federico saw Monteiro’s Recordaçoes de Casa Amarela (1989) but it was a film he described as “deliriously eccentric, a satirical bizarrie that Bunuel would have adored"."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"To my delight, Federico had seen Dans la ville blanche (1983) by Swiss director Alain Tanner. Enthusiastic about Bruno Ganz’s performance, he also was impressed by the film’s startling visual poetry of Lisbon achieved by transferring inferior film stock onto 35mm. It was exactly this kind of uncomplicated technical innovation that inspired Federico during the writing of Attore. Conceived in 1992, Attore focused on the craft and the psychology of actors. Having completed a film treatment with roles for Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, and Paolo Villagio, Fellini was now wondering if he should provide Marcello with a home movie camera to be used in a loosely Shakespearian sense that all the world’s a film set. The 8mm footage of intimate memories of the theatre from his Rimini childhood would then be transferred to 35mm – a most intriguing idea that would have been a new departure for the Maestro had he lived to bring it to the screen."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"It was Italian playwright and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano who first spoke to Fellini of Fernando Pessoa during their collaboration on I Vitelloni (1953). Fellini claimed, however, that it was not until he lunched with Anthony Burgess in the mid 1970s (when the British writer owned a country house in Bracciano north of Rome) that he began reading the Portuguese poet in earnest. This is not to suggest that Pessoa influenced Fellini in any direct way but simply to note a genial coincidence embedded within two autobiographical masterpieces. The first quotation is from Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego: ‘These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.’ The second is from Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) during the crucial night scene at the base of the scaffolding when Guido confesses to Rosella, “I have really nothing to say in my film. But I want to say it anyway.” Suddenly, the disparate obsessions of these two great Mediterranean minds seem to fold into one another, if only for an instant, like the sounds of vibrating wires touched simultaneously. Whatever the ultimate significance may be, it amuses me to think that textual coincidences of this nature are proof of the brotherhood of artists."

- Damian Pettigrew

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"We lunched in Fregene: grilled sardines sprinkled with parsley and lemon. Federico ate daintily, like someone with no appetite. The beach was deserted, the wind brisk. In the distance stood the abandoned lighthouse he filmed for 8 1/2. Like someone about to propose a toast, he stood up and "recited" from King Lear :"

- Damian Pettigrew

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"There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

- Michael Herr

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"I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."

- Michael Herr

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"War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway."

- Michael Herr

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"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."

- Michael Herr

• 0 likes• Journalists from Kentucky• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States• People from Lexington• Postmodern authors•
"Soldier: You guys aught to do a story on me suntahm. Herr: Why should we do a story about you? Soldier: 'Cause I'm so fuckin' good, 'n' that ain' no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. 'N' fifty caribou. Them're all certified."

- Michael Herr

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"Mal Hombre: God damn it, Sergeant. I thought you were a professional soldier. Sergeant: I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, and I was gonna lose my man. Mal Hombre: This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant? Sergeant: Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?"

- Michael Herr

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"Black sergeant: You a reporter? Herr: No, a writer. Black sergeant: Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go."

- Michael Herr

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"Love means never having to say you're sorry."

- Erich Segal

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"They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked."

- Erich Segal

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"It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special."

- Erich Segal

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"Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me."

- Conan O'Brien

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"I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."

- Conan O'Brien

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"Now that this mess is almost behind me – I just have one last request: HBO, when you make the movie about this whole NBC late night fiasco, I’d like to be played by Academy-Award winning actress Tilda Swinton."

- Conan O'Brien

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"Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun. And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…"

- Conan O'Brien

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"This is unusual and upsetting but we got some news -- we got some news during the show that -- that Robin Williams has passed away. (some in the audience audibly gasp in disbelief) And by the time we air the -- we tape these shows a few hours early -- and by the time you see this now on TV I'm sure that you'll -- you'll know. I'm sorry to everyone in our studio audience that I'm breaking this news. This is absolutely shocking and -- and -- and horrifying and so upsetting on every level and we're at the end of the show and it just felt like we needed to just acknowledge. Obviously, we don't know much yet. We know that this has happened and we're absolutely stunned."

- Conan O'Brien

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"I get vaccinated five to six times a day and I feel great!!"

- Bob Saget

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"Full House gave me Tourette's. We would be on the set, and, action! "Okay, Michelle, you can't have a horse in the house--" and, cut! "Cock sh*t f**k!""

- Bob Saget

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"People ask me what my favorite episode of Full House is; it was the last one!"

- Bob Saget

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"This woman woke up to see me and John Stamos banging on her windows. She must have thought she died and went to sitcom hell."

- Bob Saget

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"If you laugh at that, you lower the bar, and I will limbo under it because I am a f*cked-up guy!"

- Bob Saget

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"Kids, do not f*ck that sh*t; you'll get an infection."

- Bob Saget

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"That would be a good public service announcement for Nickelodeon: "Hi, this is Bob Saget. Don't f*ck that sh*t. Stay in school. And read!""

- Bob Saget

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"I don't call her my middle child, I call her my center child, Because the world revolves around her."

- Bob Saget

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"I've banged half the girls in this room, and that is f**kin' not true. I haven't banged anyone here. I've put my pinky in your butts, couple of you."

- Bob Saget

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Television personalities• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins. But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didn't want to disappoint my mom, but I couldn't take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the most — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor — had also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldn't say in public."

- Bob Saget

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"In my career I've had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds. By day I've done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, I've gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescent's delight about my grandma's projectile diarrhea. That in itself could, by many psychiatrists' standards, be a bit of a call for help. I never do it to shock anyone, even though people have sometimes thought of me as a shock comic. If it is a through-line or a constant to what I do, it's not something I'm proud of. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It's more of a handicap. Or, depending on your perspective, a gift. It's what I used to think of as my mania. Now I've come to embrace it. You have to love yourself. But not in a movie theater, because they will tabloid your ass."

- Bob Saget

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"I'm always amazed when I go to do stand-up dates and the ad in the paper says, "For Mature Audiences Only." Nothing could be more immature than my stand-up. It's all derived from the silly humor my dad instilled in me. Poop and penis jokes. I really should be billed in perpetuity as "For Immature Audiences Only." I'm in the process of evolving past that. Could take a while."

- Bob Saget

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"The Internet has opened the door wide to the world of haters. I'm a viral kind of guy so I know that being on Twitter itself is just asking for it. But thankfully, I see a lot more lovers than haters. And the haters I get, if I happen to see them I block 'em. I just don't need to do negative anymore. When you perform live, eventually you're going to make direct eye contact with that one guy in the audience with his arms folded staring back at you. But I process it differently now. Maybe I misread that guy. Maybe he was just cold or checking his armpits for sweat or just had a really bad day. And the great thing is, if I ever need a counterpoint to the arms-folded guy, I can just go right to my Twitter account and read, "@bobsaget is my favorite person in this entire world." And then at the last minute I can decide not to post it."

- Bob Saget

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"As I wrote this book, a lot of people asked me if I had a ghostwriter. The answer is yes. It was Ernest Hemingway. And my house is full of his ghost vomit and urine. Hemingway said something that helped me get through this, my first book: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.""

- Bob Saget

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"What I wanted to share were my feelings about how humor gets you through this life and through all the dark times. For me, it's occasionally irreverent and immature humor. But funny is funny. Like my friend Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "It is what it is." As I was adding those words earlier in this book, I was inspired to call my friend David Permut, who was Rodney's dear friend as well. I don't call David that much — good friend that I am — and I called him on his cell, unblocked. David answered the phone: "You're not going to believe this." I said, "What did I do? Have one of those psychic moments that I'm always bragging I have?" He continued: "Bob, I am standing at this moment on Rodney's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame." He'd had a meeting to go to and visited Rodney's star because he had a half hour to kill. He hadn't been there since the day he and I were there for the ceremony when Rodney got the star. The morning he got some "respect." A moment of synchronicity like that tells me that everything is where it's supposed to be. We all have them; they give us chills and let us know we are truly in the present. The key is to remember the moments. Don't take them for granted. I learned from everyone I treasure — my daughters, my parents, Don Rickles, all my friends and relatives who went through huge losses our entire childhoods — that humor, however you define it, gets us through the saddest of times."

- Bob Saget

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"My dad went through a sea of deaths. The oldest of six, he buried his four younger brothers and four of his children. Yes, I was it. His philosophy after grieving was to laugh. To try to bring some joy to others, because life is just so hard sometimes. Because it ends. My father also had a huge amount of dignity. This Mark Twain quote sums up the way my father and mother felt about life: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." As crazy and dark as I would imagine some of these stories sounded, I am very proud of the life I have led so far. I have a lot of love in my life. And a lot of laughs. And I wish that for you all. I wish that even for the guy in the audience with his arms folded."

- Bob Saget

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Television personalities• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things&mdash;racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness&mdash;but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open."

- Dennis Lehane

• 0 likes• Detective fiction authors• Screenwriters from the United States• Novelists from Boston• Edgar Award winners•
"I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum."

- Dennis Lehane

• 0 likes• Detective fiction authors• Screenwriters from the United States• Novelists from Boston• Edgar Award winners•
"Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well...Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew."

- Dennis Lehane

• 0 likes• Detective fiction authors• Screenwriters from the United States• Novelists from Boston• Edgar Award winners•
"Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on."

- Dennis Lehane

• 0 likes• Detective fiction authors• Screenwriters from the United States• Novelists from Boston• Edgar Award winners•
"Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus, and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy, and more than anything else in the world, you wanna get off. And the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going. Well, I can get off right now if I want to. Because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's still the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. Whenever I've had enough, it's my stop. I've had enough."

- Marsha Norman

• 0 likes• Pulitzer Prize winners• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Louisville• Novelists from Kentucky• Playwrights from the United States•
"I found an old baby picture of me... and it was somebody else - not me. It was somebody pink and fat. Who never heard of sick or lonely. Somebody who cried and got fed. And reached up and got held. Slept whenever she wanted to just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving over, round her head. And chewed on a polka-dot whale. And woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day. Rolled over and drooled on a sheet. Felt your hand pull the quilt back up over me. That's who I started out. And this is who's left."

- Marsha Norman

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"I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it."

- Marsha Norman

• 0 likes• Pulitzer Prize winners• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Louisville• Novelists from Kentucky• Playwrights from the United States•
"Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love and they worked together to fill these rooms with high-end, consumer-grade equipment. It was a tight situation. The next sudden move would have to be through the wall."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound."

- Miranda July

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"That is my problem with life, I just rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down like I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I wanted to make the movie feel like life feels to me — and life feels both sad and dark and confusing and more than hopeful — it feels like something totally incredible could happen at any moment and with no explanation."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . . That’s always sort of fascinating to me."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I’m totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"At this point, I’ve come to realize that where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I think, ultimately, my character comes to think that the desire for a shared dream, a shared fantasy, a shared world, was really an attempt at a recreation of a certain kind of childhood pain. Our relationships are built on our first experiences with our parents, so the idea that longing and fantasy and boundarylessness had been established then and didn’t quite function in an adult landscape was — I mean, it’s still quite slippery for me to talk about in this way, and in fiction I felt like I had a shot. You don’t have to be articulate, which I think is important — you can let characters be dumb and stumbling. That is what art can do that talking about art can’t."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I pretended that I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy that I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest. I looked down from the sky and into his eyes and I said, It wasn't your fault. I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered, again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told. I imagined couples at the altar, standing before the priest, declaring It's not your fault to each other, before kissing in the union."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. It is actually really hard to write something that will make a terminally ill person feel better. And Positive has rules, you can't just lift your guidance from the Bible or a book about Zen; they want original material. So far none of my submissions have gotten in, but I'm getting closer."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

- Miranda July

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"Since I started making art, I’ve always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?"

- Miranda July

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"I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"What I like best is the kind of complicated messed up truth, you know … the one that's so imperfect that you know it's true."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"July’s unnamed narrator is a married artist with a young child — not unlike the author herself — who has just turned 45 and plans to mark the occasion by traveling alone from her home in Los Angeles to New York, temporarily leaving the domestic space to conjure inspiration for her next project. Instead of flying, she decides to try to become someone who drives across the country. "This could be the turning point of my life," she reflects. "If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life." The splitting of one life into two. Another binary. She doesn’t make it to New York. In a move that rejects the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, she never even leaves California. But transformation happens anyway."

- Miranda July

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"July’s film fits no genre, fulfills no expectations, creates its own rules and seeks only to share a strange, lovable mind with us."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Unlike certain directors who fixate on marginalia, creating art in which the engraving on a character’s belt buckle takes precedence over the story, July’s seemingly superficial gestures service something greater: a pulsing emotional center. It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential."

- Miranda July

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"The Future is really good, a film that’s not only tighter than the free-ranging Me and You but also more mature and tonally darker. (It’s literally darker, too: July shot it in a pastel-free palette of beiges and browns.) It may not convert all her critics, and it might shock some of her fans. But “The Future” should definitively dispel the lingering notion that her art is some gossamer, transient confection. The film is devoted to the only truths worth engaging, about love, sex and death, all questions unasked in the neutered, cutesy world of, say, Napoleon Dynamite and the like. “I do believe my work should be of service,” she told me. The Future is not just a rebuke to the idea that her work is somehow shallow; it actively attacks the idea of shallowness. July wants you to feel a part of something larger than yourself and, in The Future, you do."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"A recent profile in The New York Times Magazine depicted Ms. July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of The Future seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response. Are you curious? Enchanted? Frustrated? All of the above?"

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"The magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and Ms. July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings. … The complexity of “The Future” is contained in its title, which refers simultaneously to a terrifying abstraction — an unknowable territory bounded by death, eternity, the end of time — and to a concrete, trivial fact. What are you going to do next? It’s a huge, scary question, but the answer is usually to be small and specific. Use your imagination. Go see this movie."

- Miranda July

• 0 likes• Actresses from Vermont• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Every battle, every war - is fought for things worth dying for."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"You know they're all gay, right? … Male strippers. Fruity as cake. Queer as a cardinal."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Get me a drink, or I'll tell you I love you. I'll wake you up in an hour or two, crooning, all sloppy and maudlin, tell you I love you really. You'd like that, right? Hearing Momma tell you she loves you? Isn't that what you want, deep inside?"

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"The only thing that matters is what you do now, here."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Don't cook that chicken - it still has feathers."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"The answer is what the answer always is, that we are animals, that at the end we turn on each other, tearing each other apart. To survive. Throw Lubov to the men in the guard shack like a scrap of meat to a pack of wolves... why not, it is for survival. Fight, kill each other, over the warmth of the stove? Of course - it is survival. I refuse to survive. But I will live."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Just because you’re living in blissful oblivion doesn’t mean you’re not responsible."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Spending the day with you has been marginally better than watching mother die of cancer."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"No offense to your father, Jim, but let's face it—the man's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Moldering in the ground, being eaten by worms, and...what's that kind of fly that lays its eggs in rotting meat? You know the ones, little white maggots wriggling everywhere. Those."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"You can't make cheese from rats. … It's hard enough just milking the little beggars."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"I said I'd make ye a man, Jim - but damme if ye didn't go and do it behind my back when I were watching elsewhere."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"You'll find, young Jim, that there are two measures of a man. Only two. What he will die for...and what he will kill for. You made your choice aboard the Hispaniola."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"What about what he lives for, Squire? Isn't that the true measure of a man, what he lives for?"

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"The waves round the horn will toss us to and fro, to and fro like a rubber duckie in the bathtub of an angry God."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"I thought I would try my hand at sailing. It was too small and kept sinking, so I decided to try a boat instead."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"I hate whales. I hate them. I can’t stand those stupid, blubbery, floating around, self-indulgent smug-faced krill-eating fat jerks with all their sycophantic hippie save-the- planet peacenik eco-terrorist generation X-er groupies. Greenpeace? Get a job!"

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Don’t be afraid, my Lord. My father always says that fear is the devil’s hairbrush, although no one knows quite what he means by it."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Marriage is the safe harbor men proffer from a tempest they themselves conjure into creation."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"One cannot restrain a dancing cow."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"One of those monstrosities that nature so cruelly inflicts upon her world, like a two headed calf or a servant with ginger eyebrows."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"A servant is the true reflection of his master."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react... should all be dragged against a wall and shot."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker."

- Arthur M. Jolly

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"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."

- Brad Bird

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"No capes!!!"

- Brad Bird

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"The Iron Giant (1999)"

- Brad Bird

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"The Incredibles (2004)"

- Brad Bird

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"Ratatouille (2007)"

- Brad Bird

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"Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)"

- Brad Bird

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"Tomorrowland (2015)"

- Brad Bird

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"Incredibles 2 (2018)"

- Brad Bird

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"Batteries Not Included (1987)"

- Brad Bird

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"I was listening to Tim Powers talking and he said he didn't want his villains just defeated, he wanted them humiliated and destroyed. And I thought: 'I don't. I want my villains to be understood and forgiven."

- Daniel Abraham

• 0 likes• Fantasy authors• Science fiction authors from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Writers are a basically insecure bunch. We are convinced that everything we do sucks, all the time. It's something you have to fight. The best way to make sure that your writing will never be particularly good is to use it for something besides telling the story. And I think there's a real tension between sophistication and accessibility."

- Daniel Abraham

• 0 likes• Fantasy authors• Science fiction authors from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I don't find fantasy to be more or less suited to philosophical questions than any other genre, really. I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia. The impulse to return to a golden age seems to be pretty close to the bone, at least in western cultures, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a human universal. For me, it's tied up with the experience of aging and the impulse to recapture youth. Epic fantasy, I think, takes its power from that. We create golden eras and either celebrate them or—more often—mourn their loss."

- Daniel Abraham

• 0 likes• Fantasy authors• Science fiction authors from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think that the successful genres of a particular period are reflections of the needs and thoughts and social struggles of that time. When you see a bunch of similar projects meeting with success, you’ve found a place in the social landscape where a particular story (or moral or scenario) speaks to readers. You’ve found a place where the things that stories offer are most needed. And since the thing that stories most often offer is comfort, you’ve found someplace rich with anxiety and uncertainty. (That’s what I meant when I said to Melinda Snodgrass that genre is where fears pool.)"

- Daniel Abraham

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"For the moment, it's called the Dagger and the Coin, but with any luck, that'll swap out for a better name. There are some things in the proposal that need to get smoothed out so that everyone's on board, but I think it'll happen. It's a very different from the Long Price books. It looks and feels more like traditional epic fantasy -- quasi-Europe, ferinstance, and some dragons in the background, no 15-year gaps between books -- but the plot structure is packed with everything I think is cool. There are echoes I'm intentionally building in of from things as familiar as Firefly and The Count of Monte Cristo and as obscure as Tevis' Queen's Gambit and Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair. And the magic system is all about faith and deception, which will be tricky and fun both. What I want to do is write something that I could read now (39 years old, married, raising a kid, 10 year IT career behind me, post 9-11, post-Bush, etc.) with the same joy I read the Belgariad when I was 16."

- Daniel Abraham

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"It’s always been like this. Every generation finds its own way to show that it isn’t like the one before. Too much risk, too much sex, terrible music, not enough respect for the old ways. This is no different."

- Daniel Abraham

• 0 likes• Fantasy authors• Science fiction authors from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"All those rumors about her being underweight are trash. She's gorgeous."

- Ben Stiller

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"There's an old saying in Hollywood: It's not the length of your film, it's how you use it."

- Ben Stiller

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"People like to define you through what they’ve seen you do … There are aspects of my personality, I guess, that come through on-screen, but I don’t sit around thinking, I’ve been a bumbling suitor all my life."

- Ben Stiller

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"When I didn’t have a family, I was much more of a workaholic … I still like to work, but I also want to be home with them. As you get older, you realize you need balance. If it’s not fun, what’s the point?"

- Ben Stiller

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"We covered "Hey Jude." My father panicked, misunderstanding the lyrics and thinking our lead singer was belting out "Hey, Jew" to a roomful of Holocaust survivors."

- Ben Stiller

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I can't design a mask and say to someone else, "Just do it." It's partly because I'm a better sculptor than I am a drawer. Considering the amount of time it would take me to draw exactly what I want, I might as well sculpt it. I paint most of it too. It's incredibly time consuming so I end up turning down a lot of jobs I want to do."

- Julie Taymor

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"We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform."

- Julie Taymor

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"I would never do something with just puppets. . . But I like the things puppets allow you to do. I had this puppet Dinah Donewell, and she had this hand puppet named Mr. Pleaser. He was her lap dog who was constantly under her skirt. Now if you did that with actors, people would be offended. But in this case, so what? It was a puppet with a puppet."

- Julie Taymor

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"I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that."

- Julie Taymor

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"The first thing I do when I’m creating, either for stage or for cinema, is to find the ideograph of the story. Which is; the one, simple expression that can tell everything. And at the same time be recognizable for the audience. It’s like in old Japanese paintings — if you were to paint a bamboo forest, you should be able to find its essence with only three strokes."

- Julie Taymor

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"Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power … but it’s also got this great superhero, and — hey! — he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It’s got villains, it’s got skyscrapers, it’s colorful, it’s Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn’t resist."

- Julie Taymor

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"To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality. I find that I make as an artist the kind of choices that I have to be impassioned about. I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself. That's a difference. Frida painted her own reality, her life. I'm a director and I paint many other people... Other people's realities. But I do have to invest in it."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"We always write stories of tragedies because that's how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way. When I talk about passion, and I'm not a religious person, but I absolutely am drawn and attracted to the power of religious art because it gets at that most extreme emotion of the human experience."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation became the main word in my life. Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it."

- Julie Taymor

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"I used to say that arts were talked about in the arts and leisure page. Now, why would it be arts and leisure? Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life? I think that art has become a big scarlet letter in our culture. It's a big "A." And it says, you are an elitist, you're effete, or whatever those things...do you know what I mean? It means you don't connect. And I don't believe that. I think we've patronized our audiences long enough. You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses."

- Julie Taymor

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"When I was 14 or 13 or 15 I went to Sri Lanka on the Experiment in International Living for a summer. I wanted to travel. And going outside of my own culture and traveling and seeing my own world from a foreign perspective is a big part of my life and who I am. That's what I was talking about earlier, is stepping outside of yourself and examining yourself with a different perspective is very important, and it's important to do as an artist for others."

- Julie Taymor

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"I read a lot of books that are, for lack of a better word, cross-cultural. I find movies and books that take me — transport me to another culture are the things that I'm most interested in, and always have been."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"Where I live is not necessarily in New York City. That's where my apartment is, but I live in Mexico, or I live in Indonesia. I live in Japan. I feel as comfortable in those other cultures, because, in a way, I'm always uncomfortable. I can't explain that, exactly, but I put myself into situations where I'm forced to do something, to create, to respond, to see differently."

- Julie Taymor

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"You know, we still hear the word "puppet" and we get this nauseating image of some kind of Muppet or something. Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal."

- Julie Taymor

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"We can either be monsters or angels. We are able to be demons and angels, as that book says. We are able to be incredibly creative or to be incredibly destructive. We have that decision to make, to create something. It could be grotesque and ugly, but it is monstrously beautiful, so it inspires people."

- Julie Taymor

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"I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting."

- Julie Taymor

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"Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. … A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. … each art form makes me more interested in the other art form because I try and bring in those techniques and those ideas and put them into a different way of using them."

- Julie Taymor

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"I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe — as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" — that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed.""

- Julie Taymor

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"The concrete world isn't necessarily the most powerful world. The world of the mind — whether you're watching Matrix or whatever — the world that's inside here has the power to do a lot of good and a lot of damage."

- Julie Taymor

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"There is something human beings can do. "The adrenaline rush," we call it. Fear, tremendous love. When people kill themselves, commit suicide over love, that kind of passion will move mountains."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"I'm not one of these people that go, "Oh well, I'm just going to do my art and I don't give a shit what anybody thinks." I don't feel that way. I really, really love to have people honestly be moved and inspired. And whether it's just here or just here — it's always better if it's the both. That's why Shakespeare is so great, because he gets you from the gut to the heart to the head, and that's what I aspire to do, more than anything."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"In our culture, we think that happy and color is trivial, that black and darkness is deeper. But Nietzsche said — which is a line that I firmly believe — "Joy is deeper than sorrow, for all joy seeks eternity." And if you see Grendel, you'll see, as he's on the edge of the abyss, ready to leap to his death, he sings, "Is it joy I feel? Is it joy I feel?" And it's so, so moving. You can have a lot of different explanations for the ending of that opera, but there is something so palpable that you will feel when he sings those lines."

- Julie Taymor

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"I love it when people say "What a horrible, lousy idea." I think that's great … I hate the comfort zone … I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"I'm trying to make the theatrical experience an environmental experience. We want to have the theatre of it right in the laps of the audience … You don't know until the last half second that he's going to be that close."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"Oh, yeah, I'm scared. If you don't have fear then you are not taking a chance. But what I do have is a team. If your collaborators are there, which is what answers the fear question, and they all are as impassioned as you are, and believe in it, then your fear is mitigated."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"Julie Taymor's definitely a magician. And I think that's what you call a person who, even though they put the rabbit in the hat, is really surprised when it comes out: that's her."

- Julie Taymor

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Theatre directors• Designers from the United States•
"It’s not difficult to see why Taymor, with her penchant for folk tales and fascination with the cycles of life, would be attracted to the epic tale of an ordinary boy who must cross the thresholds of death and rebirth to claim the mantle of hero."

- Julie Taymor

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"Even though she is enduringly fond of her creations, Ms. Taymor never operates any of the puppets herself. "I can't do everything," she said. … Becoming renowned for puppets is not easy — finding a new galaxy or making the draw at Wimbledon is easier. … People sometimes sum her up simply as a puppeteer, which aggravates her to no end. She prefers to be thought of as a writer and director who happens to use puppets. American culture, she believes, does not pay due homage to the idea of the puppet. … She believes it might be better to allude to her puppets as "kinetic sculpture.""

- Julie Taymor

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"A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door — he's the person who opens a door funny."

- Chuck Jones

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"As Norman McLaren said, animation is not a bunch of drawings that move — it's a bunch of drawings of movement."

- Chuck Jones

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"John Lewell: Can you tell us: what exactly was Jack Warner like, as an employer? Chuck Jones: Well, what he was like was nothing! We had nothing to do with Jack Warner. After fifteen years of direction (and the other person present, Friz Ferleng, had directed longer than that) we were finally invited by him to have lunch in the executive dining room. This was reserved for executives and favorite directors. Jack Warner was there. And Harry Warner was there. Jack didn't say very much to us. He was talking to other people about other things. But Harry Warner said: "The only thing I know about our cartoon department is that we make Mickey Mouse." Well, that was a little startling. It was the early 1950s, for God's sake! And so when we left, I said: "Don't worry, Mr Warner, we'll continue to make good Mickey Mouses!" And he patted me on the back."

- Chuck Jones

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"Animation in itself is an art form, and that's the point I think always needs clarification. True animation exists without any background, or any color, or any sound, or anything else; it exists in your hand. And you can take it and flip it. [...] What makes animation is the fact that you have a series of drawings that move. You don't even have to have a camera, you see; animation exists without it. If you want to broaden your audience, or make it more colorful or add music, then you put it under a camera one frame at a time, and then you run it at the same speed as you flip it, and then you have animation. If it depends basically upon soundtrack, or basically upon music, or color, graphic design, or anything else to sustain itself, then it is not unique to animation."

- Chuck Jones

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"The best way, of course, to understand the animator is to see that he parallels the actor. He has the same responsibility a fine actor has. [...] Even the people who write about animation just don't seem to understand that when you have a drawing, you don't have a character. [...] "This is the first Bugs Bunny" has no meaning. It's how Bugs came to stand and move and act, and what his feelings were, and his thoughts, and what kind of personality he was. That developed over a period of time. And you need fine animators to do that."

- Chuck Jones

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"Everything on Saturday morning [cartoons] moves alike—that's one of the reasons it's not animation. The drawings are different, but everybody acts the same way, their feet move the same way, and everybody runs the same way. It doesn't matter whether it's an alligator or a man or a baby or anything, they all move the same."

- Chuck Jones

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"[W]hen the coyote falls, he gets up and brushes himself off; it's preservation of dignity. He's humiliated, and it worries him when he ends up looking like an accordion. A coyote isn't much, but it's better than being an accordion."

- Chuck Jones

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"Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable–this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience's opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity."

- Chuck Jones

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"A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together."

- Chuck Jones

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"The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first."

- Chuck Jones

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"I don’t mind people admiring me if they want to but I don’t think it’s very logical. It’s not like I was St. George knocking off some dumb dragon or anything like that. First of all, you’re talking about something I did a long, long time ago. Secondly, we were doing things that were not expected to last a lifetime. We figured they’d last about three years and then disappear forever. Remember there was no television back then and no place for the cartoons to go after they left the theaters.But I’m not trying to demean what we did. I always took the work very seriously and I’m proud to have been associated with the work we did. It’s just that adulation is impractical and makes me uncomfortable. Nobody noticed us back then. Nobody called us geniuses. And we didn’t feel like artists. We were just trying to make people laugh."

- Chuck Jones

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"A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose."

- Larry McMurtry

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"It's really quite simple. Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I'll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums."

- Larry McMurtry

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"We choose our lovers for their flaws, you know," Mel said. "People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about."

- Larry McMurtry

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""Pat, did they get you for the embezzling?" Harmony asked."

- Larry McMurtry

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"I asked Michael (Bay) why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to shut the fuck up, so that was the end of that talk. He said, 'You know, Ben, just shut up, okay? You know, this is a real plan.' I was like, 'You mean it's a real plan at NASA to train oil drillers?' And he was, 'Just shut your mouth.' See, here's where we demonstrate that, because Bruce (Willis) is going to tell the guys they did a bad job of building the drill tank. See, he's a salt-of-the-earth guy, and the NASA nerd-o-nauts don't understand his salt-of-the-earth way, his rough-and-tumble ways. Like somehow they can build rocket ships, but they don't understand what makes a good tranny. Like eight whole months, as if that's not long enough to learn to drill a hole. But in a week, we're gonna learn how to be astronauts. I mean, this a little bit of a stretch, let's face it. 'They don't know jack about drilling'? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on."

- Ben Affleck

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"I'm always described as "cocksure" or "with a swagger," and that bears no resemblance to who I feel like inside. I feel plagued by insecurity."

- Ben Affleck

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"This is a second act for me, and you give me that. I wanna thank you for this. I'm so grateful and proud. I just wanna to dedicated this (the award) to anyone else out there, who is trying to get a second act, because you can do. (Speech after receiving the British Academy Film Awards for the Best Director)"

- Ben Affleck

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"We've killed more Muslims than they've killed us by an awful lot, and we've invaded more Islamic nations. But we're exempted from these things?"

- Ben Affleck

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"I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful."

- Vincent Gallo

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"One has to be slightly unpopular to have a profound vision."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Let’s make decisions for the good of all. Let’s really think in a broader way. Let’s think a little past the obvious. And in that regard I’m always shot down, I’m always called a fascist, I’m always called a homophobe, and I’m always called a freak because I’m conservative politically. But how many phony liberals in Hollywood have danced at the Gaiety? I did. And part of me understands when I’m bashed in the media, for the things that I say, because I use loose language and crude descriptions."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I’m not against celebrating the differences of individuals. What I’m against is the homogeny of mankind because that’s regressive. To celebrate the differences of people is fantastic, but to blend them all together… You know, the same homosexual community that I found such compassion from, I don’t feel that camaraderie from them anymore; I don’t feel it in the social scene; I don’t feel it in the arts. That’s weird to me. Because that was the group that I learned the most from, because they were certainly the most open-minded at that time. But if I say things about the mainstreaming of homosexuals, it’s because I don’t believe in mainstreaming or special interests legislating for themselves. What has happened with gays in America is that they pander so much to the heterosexual mainstream that they’ve taken on the complexes of the heterosexual mainstream."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Say whatever you want, but try to be productive and positive and friendly. It's nice to be friendly. I was friendly once. It felt real good"

- Vincent Gallo

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"I never apologized for anything in my life. The only thing I’m sorry about is putting a curse on Roger Ebert’s colon. If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn’t like my movie, then I’m sorry for him."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I have no publicist, no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no assistant, no helper, no stylist, no intern, no maid, no gardener, nothing. Oh, I have a dentist. I had a shrink but he died 9 years ago, right when I needed him most."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I like nice, honest, talented people."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I don't trust or love anyone.Because people are all creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I'm the happiest the saddest guy in the world can be."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I don't really get inspired by other peoples' movies. I get inspired by situations, by memory, by revenge."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I feel very happy that Bush is our president. One way that you can tell we have a good president, is by how much the French dislike him. The more the French hate him, the better he must be. And they hate this one."

- Vincent Gallo

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"When I was a boy I was always depressed and confused, now I think I'm not garbage. I don't try to prove to my parents that I am good at something anymore. But I am a failure with women. I can only be a one night lover."

- Vincent Gallo

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"No woman could ever hurt me, because I don't permit myself to wish for something from people. So they can't disappoint me."

- Vincent Gallo

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"In the past they (pain and revenge) helped me a lot, but now I prefer love to inspire me. All that arises from fear and grudge can perhaps make me more interesting but it is not what I want."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I'm not really a collage artist like Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson. I'm not like those other guys, Spike Jonze, too, guys who watch things and take notes. I'm trapped in my own stubborn world over-and-over, looking for a similar insight, a similar aesthetic, a similar point of view."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I'm not a career filmmaker and by that I'm not tearing down people who are, but I'm not Wes Anderson who can rent out a floor at the Chateau Marmont for a month to write my new screenplay--I have a life outside of filmmaking and after Buffalo '66, I genuinely thought I was done with making movies. But they pulled me back in. This Brown Bunny, it had something in it for me that I just had to say. I had to express it, it was in me and it ate its way out of me. I wished that it didn't, but it did and I was surprised to find myself shooting again."

- Vincent Gallo

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"The best articles about Vincent Gallo were written by Vincent Gallo, the best acting performance of Vincent Gallo was directed and edited by Vincent Gallo from a screenplay written by Vincent Gallo, even the best photographs of Vincent Gallo were taken by Vincent Gallo."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I’m clearly a small-minded person, with my own petty grievances. Hopefully, my work transcends my own petty grievances and small-minded nature. It’s best for me to remain small-minded on an emotional level and broad-minded on a conceptual level. It doesn’t matter whatever it is that makes me do my work. Neurosis, obsession, wanting people to like me, wanting my parents to feel bad for underrating me, making a lot of money, power, social status, wanting girls to like me or just to meet one girl on a job. All of this doesn’t matter as long as the work that I do to achieve these small-minded needs is a lot more interesting than me and my reasons for making it"

- Vincent Gallo

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"Joey Ramone was clearly one of the most original singers of all time. And he was the sweetest guy. And his death is very sad."

- Vincent Gallo

• 0 likes• Actors from Buffalo• Film directors from the United States• Painters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"If the film language and sensibility are not integrated somewhere in the narrative, then they are inconsequential, separate. And if you have one point of view, one aesthetic, one sensibility throughout everything you do, and you don't let people sway you away from that, especially your cinematographer, then the film develops a soul."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I've only had three idols in my life. Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for the Colts, Richard Nixon, and Chris Squire, the bass player for Yes-Squire being my number one. My love, fascination and devotion for Chris Squire is deep. The pain of my whole childhood was sedated by listening to Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis records. And now here I am, 25 years later, and my Yes obsession is the only thing I haven't outgrown."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I don't drink any coffee or take any drugs and I don't smoke cigarettes and I don't eat sugar and I don't take any medicine at all. I eat a lot of fish, vegetables, and I stay away from starches."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I sure do like the color brown. And pink. Pink and brown. If I had to choose, pink would lose."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most talented, charming, charismatic, clever, bright, irresponsible, self-centered, self-indulgent, lying bastards that I've ever met."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I never wanted to be an actor. I never want to be an actor. I want to be a movie star. The whole idea of having to act is too gruesome. It's too ambitious for me."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Most people want to be actors because they want unconditional love and power and money and to be able to act out a character fantasy that involves themselves. So if one is truly honest about themselves in that way, then you're on the right path. If not, the process becomes convoluted. You have to go out grab it, and demand it."

- Vincent Gallo

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"The common purpose of pornography is to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy. It is meant to be free of things like guilt, insecurity, anger or responsibility. It can also be detached from the struggles of intimacy. I chose to use imagery common in pornography but placed these images in the emotional context which included intense guilt, anger, regret, anguish, and confusion. In this context, it is difficult for the images to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy. Instead, the graphic images work better to enhance the discomfort of intimacy."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Listening to nasty remarks about me or my work doesn’t feel good. I don’t enjoy being unpopular, however in order to think freely, I must be willing to risk being unpopular. To think, I must risk being offensive. Anyway, most people are not listening but instead projecting."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I hope my work is more interesting and more intelligent than I am."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Tolerance is tolerance is tolerance.Period, you assholes. Today’s intolerant, young, liberal California/ New Yorkers are only comfortable within their own shared consensus. Friends must think alike and believe the same things now. They must vote the same and defend the same ideology like zombies. Anyone who disagrees can only be evil, stupid, and wrong."

- Vincent Gallo

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"Feminism should be a fight for fairness. Instead the fight is only to control outcome. And when feminists don’t like outcome, they assume something’s unfair. Like fools. Most of the left is the same way."

- Vincent Gallo

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"The reasons why I do things are difficult for me to understand and difficult for me to explain."

- Vincent Gallo

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"I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President. And I’m sorry if that offends you."

- Vincent Gallo

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"In life, there are times to be quiet, and there are times to shut the fuck up. This is one of those times."

- Spike Lee

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"Let me tell you the story of right hand-left hand. It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand—Love—is finished. But hold on, stop the presses; the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that's right. Ooh, it's a devastating right and Hate is hurt. He's down. Left-Hand Hate KO-ed by Love."

- Spike Lee

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"I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night."

- Spike Lee

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"Everybody's a teacher. People can teach you two things, what to do and what not to do."

- Spike Lee

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"You always avoid direct eye contact, you know that? Are you afraid of something? Are you afraid that I might see the real you? Huh? Answer me. Come on, answer me."

- Spike Lee

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"I know that it's painful at times, but we're not making this up. The depths of degradation in cartoons, movies, and television shows, the misrepresentation of a people - it's an American legacy. Not just in television or movies, but in all media."

- Spike Lee

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"My film is supposed to reflect that; it is an indictment of the people who write and accept those shows, because we know that they exist today. It also has to do with the $1 million question: What is black? It is a never-ending quest for who we are, and some people are still in search of that."

- Spike Lee

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"You know, I grew up around black people my whole life. I mean, if the truth be told, I probably know niggas better than you. And don't go getting offended by my use of the quote-unquote N-word. I have a black wife and two biracial kids, so I feel I have a right. I don't give a God damn what that prick Spike Lee says. Tarantino was right. Nigger is just a word. If Ol' Dirty Bastard can use it every other word, why can't I?"

- Spike Lee

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"Here's the thing. I grew up in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It's changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?"

- Spike Lee

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"With Bamboozled, Lee takes a look at one of film and television's rarest breeds-the black television executive. His satire is based on the current lack of diversity in Hollywood, where 75 percent of television writers are white. And in most cases, the minority writers at networks are all working on the same show (in 1999, it was found that ABC employed nine black writers-all assigned to the same sitcom). In order to succeed in his position as a black television executive, then, Lee's main character delves back into the history of blacks on screen to revive one of the most popular forms of early entertainment: the Minstrel. And with the Minstrel, of course, comes Blackface-perhaps the most dreaded image in the history of American media."

- Spike Lee

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"My specialty is the mechanics of research. But I test my theories about how to make discoveries by using them to make discoveries."

- Murray Leinster

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"“I’ve got an impossible job on my hands,” he told them, “and if I succeed at it, there’s an inconceivable one to follow.”"

- Murray Leinster

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"My purpose is not to make profits, but to keep people from being killed. Quaint, eh? But I’m one of the people I don’t want killed."

- Murray Leinster

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"Logics don’t work good on women. Only on things that make sense."

- Murray Leinster

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"Her eyes upon him were soft. Civilized people act upon intellectualized motives. They decide what is wise, and sometimes do it. But when they are swayed by purest primitive instincts they are usually happier. Hana was responding to one of the most ancient of all known human impulses—admiration of a proved warrior."

- Murray Leinster

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"And, just as she had responded to primitive prowess, so Ron reacted to feminine admiration by an enormously increased urge to accomplish."

- Murray Leinster

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"“Put dispassionately,” said Haynes cheerfully, “you sound like you’re crazy. But you’re stating facts. Okay so far.”"

- Murray Leinster

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"The unfamiliar is not necessarily unreasonable."

- Murray Leinster

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"Lon frowned. “They’re so far ahead of us,” he said uneasily, “that they could conquer us if they wanted to. And that’s bad!” “Lon!” said the older man severely. “They’re civilized! Civilized men don’t want to conquer other men!”"

- Murray Leinster

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"The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels."

- Murray Leinster

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"He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder."

- Murray Leinster

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"Lane understood. Burke was one of that considerable part of humanity which enthusiastically believes in anything that’s sufficiently dramatic."

- Murray Leinster

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"Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury."

- Murray Leinster

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"And this was no observation by a mere human, who might delude himself. This was a report from complex electronic devices. It was images formed on phosphors coated on radar screen tubes, excited by accelerated electrons whose pattern of impact was governed by echoes from the original of the image. Phosphors do not imagine. Electrons are not affected by panic. As a radar image it was a faithful report—in its own terms, without interpretation—of something that actually was."

- Murray Leinster

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"There are some people so stupid you have to show them everything. I didn’t realize that there are people so stupid you can’t show them anything."

- Murray Leinster

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"When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked."

- Murray Leinster

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"“Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?” “I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir—” “It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable."

- Murray Leinster

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"He signed himself prince of this, lord of that, baron of the other thing and claimant to the dukedom of something else."

- Murray Leinster

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"There was a beautiful row. You’ve really scared people, Hoddan! You deserve well of the republic! Every government and every person needs to be thoroughly terrified occasionally. It limbers up the brain."

- Murray Leinster

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"From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before he was born or would long survive his loss."

- Murray Leinster

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"Again time passed. In one of the remoter galaxies a supernova flamed, and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed experimentally—and to mankind the one event was just as important as the other."

- Murray Leinster

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"He irritably suspected himself of a tendency to make enemies unnecessarily."

- Murray Leinster

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"“It’s no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. “There’s not a bit o’ use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot’s ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin’, and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck’s wasted on him because it ain’t reasonable and he don’t believe in it when it happens! It’s taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin’ me! No, sir! I hope none o’ my descendants inherit my brains! I pity ‘em if they do!” Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he’d found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he’d gotten into this by himself! He’d chosen it! He’d practically asked for it! He began strongly to share his grandfather’s disillusioned view of brains."

- Murray Leinster

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"Hoddan angrily suspected fate and chance of plain conspiracy against him."

- Murray Leinster

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"This was the second time in his life he’d been on a horse. It was two too many."

- Murray Leinster

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"“You are wonderful!” she said with conviction. “I used to cherish that illusion myself,” said Hoddan."

- Murray Leinster

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"It couldn’t happen! Hoddan couldn’t conceive of such a thing. But a recently developed pessimism suggested that since everything else, to date, had been to his disadvantage, this was probably a catastrophe also."

- Murray Leinster

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"“You’ve got to do something!” insisted Fani. “I saw Father talking to them! He looked happy, and he never looks happy unless he’s planning some skulduggery!”"

- Murray Leinster

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"A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community."

- Murray Leinster

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"Hoddan felt the anger any man feels when he sees betrayal of that honor a competent machine represents."

- Murray Leinster

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"The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them."

- Murray Leinster

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"He needed some rather extensive changes in the relationship of the cosmos to himself."

- Murray Leinster

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"Twilight remained, a fairy half-light in which all things looked much more charming than they really were."

- Murray Leinster

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"But it might not be true enough. It might be less than...well...sufficiently true in a particular instance."

- Murray Leinster

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"It is the custom of all men, everywhere, to be obtuse where women are concerned."

- Murray Leinster

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"He’d gone to Walden in the hope of achievement. There, of course, he failed because in a free economy industrialists consider that freedom is the privilege to be stupid without penalty. In other than free economies, of course, stupidity is held to be the duty of administrators. But Hoddan now believed himself in the fascinating situation of having knowledge and abilities which were needed by people who knew their need."

- Murray Leinster

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"He was in a state of doubt which passed very well for modesty."

- Murray Leinster

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"Hoddan fumbled for her meaning. It wasn’t quite an apology for trying to get him killed. But at least it was a disclaimer of future intentions in that direction."

- Murray Leinster

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"They raise the question of whether I’ve been crazy, and am suddenly sane, or whether I’ve been sane up to now, and have suddenly gone crazy."

- Murray Leinster

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"Eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. They immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. Their first instinct was caution. When a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. It is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right."

- Murray Leinster

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"There was bitter resistance to the idea. It was demanded that Burke justify his views in a more reasonable way than by mere demonstration that they worked."

- Murray Leinster

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"As a young man he was considered promising. If he had been interested in such matters, he might have had a moderately successful career in politics, as politics was practiced in his nation. But he liked things. Real things."

- Murray Leinster

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"“It isn’t reasonable!” insisted Holmes. “It doesn’t make sense!” “The question,” observed Burke, “isn’t whether it makes sense, but whether it’s fact.”"

- Murray Leinster

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"For once, no eminent figure assumed the undignified pose involved in standing on one’s dignity."

- Murray Leinster

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"Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such beliefs come in two varieties. One kind is a conviction that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by chance and changes by chance and human beings do not matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was designed with the idea that people were going to live in it, and that what they do and what happens to them is important. This theory seems to be depressing."

- Murray Leinster

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"There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal."

- Murray Leinster

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"It isn’t illegal to buy an artist’s work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!"

- Murray Leinster

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"It was totally unrealistic to think that because there had been wildly unlikely coincidences in the immediate past, that there would be more wildly unlikely ones turning up in orderly succession. Yet..."

- Murray Leinster

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"I've never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening. Don’t you ever read about politics?"

- Murray Leinster

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"“We’re fools!” said Harrison. “Morons! Idiots!” “If you speak of my altruism,” said Pepe cheerfully, “I agree. But if you speak of your interest in a very pretty girl, then I point out that nobody is ever as happy as while he is making a fool of himself over a woman."

- Murray Leinster

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"It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable."

- Murray Leinster

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"Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing."

- Murray Leinster

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"His reasoning was emotional, and therefore simple."

- Murray Leinster

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"Facts are facts! And if they’re impossible, they’re still facts!"

- Murray Leinster

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"Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is."

- David Gerrold

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"The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other."

- David Gerrold

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"“So what happens when the camera is finally invented?” Handley let his breath escape in a whoosh. “The artists are out of jobs?” “Wrong. The artist simply have to learn how to do things that the camera can’t. The artist had to stop being a recorder and start being an interpreter. That’s when expressionism was born.”"

- David Gerrold

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"The sullen power of great violence forged into shapes of metal is always ugly."

- David Gerrold

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"It was as private as the main floor of Hell."

- David Gerrold

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"They say that killing is a mortal sin, that it is against the laws of God. If that is true—and I know now that it must be—if that is true, then every man who has ever taken a human life has been, from that moment on, damned for eternity. No matter how many men or nations say that it is all right for a man to take up arms against an enemy, it does not change that one basic fact—killing is a mortal sin. And every one of those simple white markers we had stood among represents a soul condemned. A nation had sentenced her sons to damnation so that she might survive. There’s no such thing as a “moral war.”"

- David Gerrold

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"Hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy. Not only did I try to influence the course of their actions—but I dared to do it in the name of God—I tried to save their souls! I tried to save them from themselves! Is that so horrible? Ah, yes. It is the worst of all possible crimes."

- David Gerrold

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"There isn’t a tool built that can’t be used as a weapon."

- David Gerrold

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"“You could call it that,” Auberson sighed. It wouldn’t be correct, but you could call it that."

- David Gerrold

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"“Whatever our purpose, we probably aren’t fulfilling it. We’re not functioning as we should.” He shrugged at her. “How should we function?” “Like human beings.” She said it righteously. “Isn’t that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating...?” “That’s not human.” “Oh, but it is. It’s very human.” “Well, it’s not what human should be.” “Now that’s a different story. You’re not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be.” “Well, maybe we should be what we aren’t because what we are now isn’t good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled.” “I don’t think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we’re doing it ourselves.”"

- David Gerrold

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"Auberson’s first impression of the man was of eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack."

- David Gerrold

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"Ah well—the boss didn’t have to know how to run the business. He only needed to know how to run the people who knew."

- David Gerrold

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"It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but it was strange to feel it in the daytime. Mostly, it was a nighttime visitor, an ever-gentle gnawing at the back of the head that had to be always guarded against, lest its realization sweep forth with a cold familiar rush. It was the sudden startling glimpse over the edge—the realization that death is inevitable, that it happens to everyone, that it would happen to me too; that someday, someday, the all-important I (the center of the whole thing) would cease to exist. Would stop. Would end. Would no longer be. Nothing. Nobody. Finished. Death."

- David Gerrold

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"HARLIE continued,"

- David Gerrold

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"Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master. Love."

- David Gerrold

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"I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake."

- David Gerrold

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"Now you see why I hate to leave my lab. It tires me out too much to have to do other people’s thinking for them."

- David Gerrold

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"Life is full of little surprises. Time travel is full of big ones."

- David Gerrold

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"You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference."

- David Gerrold

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"I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths."

- David Gerrold

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"I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think."

- David Gerrold

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"I wish I could change it all. I wish I could. But I can’t. Dammit. Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful."

- David Gerrold

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"Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape."

- David Gerrold

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"You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for. Live well, my son."

- David Gerrold

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"I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss."

- David Gerrold

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"Love isn't what you get. It's what you create."

- David Gerrold

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"There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs."

- David Gerrold

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"The second time is by mutual consent."

- David Gerrold

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"Life must be a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. It's always a choice between joy and despair. I tried despair. Joy is more fun."

- David Gerrold

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"Every human being is unique. We can generalize at length, but every human being is an individual. And this is especially true about children -- every child develops in their own unique way."

- David Gerrold

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"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"A cigarette only takes a certain amount of time to smoke and though this takes time it seems to take less and less with each one and you can only smoke so many, there comes a time when you have to stop, when you just cant light the next one . . . at least not for a while."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Its quite an experience to be locked up all by yourself in any size room, no less a little cell."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"He flowed deeper and deeper into himself, wrapped in the comforting strength of hate."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"A little sleep and then a little wakefulness. Then a slipping to some soothing place in between."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"They had all they needed. They had the madness of pain."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"I guess I had fun. But not enough to stay."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"There was a sense of security in old, familiar feelings in spite of their discomfort."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"A dark yet shallow sleep. A submission to exhaustion. A loss of consciousness and an avoidance of light, Yet not deep enough to avoid the turbulence on the surface while deep enough to feel the pressure from the bottom. Whatever or whoever he was sought to find the finite area where all pressures are equal and constant. To find that small pocket of weightlessness where no pressure is felt, where there is no tugging in opposite directions, no straining for a painless balance, where all of him was suspended and cushioned between the 2 crushing and yanking pressures where no pressures existed. Where no light existed. Where no time existed. Where no need or desire existed. Where there existed no blackness. There, where there existed nothing, not even a void."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Yet the harder he fought to find this the more distant it became. The more he struggled against the pressures the more imprisoned he became. The more enmeshed he became in their conflicting directions. the further he was tugged in opposite directions that kept him immobile. And the harder he fought for movement, any movement, the more stationary became his position, the more painful his existence."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are there always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"They dont know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"And their love life got better with time. Familiarity bred excitement. They loved discovering those little things, the touch, that made the other respond with a quiver or a sigh, and, in turn, having the discovery made."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"And the goddamn subway reeked like a sewer. All those goddamn animals jammed into the train like the ark . . . yeah, thats what they are, a bunch of stinking animals."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting."

- Hubert Selby, Jr.

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"...everyone knows they're going to die, but no one really believes it."

- Spalding Gray

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"The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations."

- Lawrence Wright

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"The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam."

- Lawrence Wright

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"The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character."

- Lawrence Wright

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"In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet."

- Lawrence Wright

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"Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him. He's been a symbol of resistance and also of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important."

- Lawrence Wright

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"Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida eventually will die. But the model that al-Qaida has created of an asymmetric terror group that has enormous consequences in the world well beyond the size of the group, that's going to endure. Other groups are going to try to follow that model."

- Lawrence Wright

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"People are always asking me if I'm frightened, hanging out with al Qaeda, but usually those encounters are one-on-one interviews. I'm talking to people whose views I don't agree with, but that happens all the time."

- Lawrence Wright

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"I’ve studied Jonestown, radical Islam. They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt."

- Lawrence Wright

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"When I heard the news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, I had a lot of questions. And one of the people I wanted to talk to was Lawrence Wright. He's joined us several times on the show. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, which is based in part on more than 500 interviews, including interviews with friends and relatives of bin Laden."

- Lawrence Wright

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"He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... [H]e was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them permanent."

- Elia Kazan

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"The Group was the best thing professionally that ever happened to me. I met two wonderful men. Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, both of whom were around thirty years old. They were magnetic, fearless leaders. During the summer I was an apprentice, they were entertaining in a Jewish summer camp... At the end of the summer they said to me: "You may have talent for something, but it's certainly not acting."

- Elia Kazan

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"I was thirty-three when I made A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and many leading ladies around town were considerably older. It was the first movie of Elia Kazan and for Aunt Cissie he'd wanted , who took one look at this little squirt and passed. I mean, nobody knew who he was at that stage. So he asked me and I ran with this sensational part—although he never used me again. [...] The movie made Kazan a hot commodity, but it made me a supporting character actress before my time."

- Elia Kazan

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"He was from the theatah, meaning he knew nothing about lighting, lenses, close-ups. All that was done for him by our ace cinematographer, , who actually asked Zanuck for a directing credit. He was turned down."

- Elia Kazan

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"I went to him and told him I had no such experiences in life and didn't know where to get the emotions I'd need. He was very patient with me and let me ramble on about my misgivings and anxieties. What he did, in a sense, was lock up all this intensity inside me so it wouldn't be dissipated. He was marvelous."

- Elia Kazan

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"CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"MR HEALY: Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What's wrong with labor? A man's work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We've gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it's sure we're losing the very juice of living. BOY: The world changes, Mister Healy. The old things go, and each of us must make peace with the new."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . ."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Now, the word for television drama is depth, the digging under the surface of life for the more profound truths of human relationships. I cannot help but feel that this is where drama is going. People are beginning to turn into themselves, looking for personal happiness. The jargon of introspection has become everyday conversation. The theater and all its sister mediums [i.e. film; TV; books] can only be a reflection of their times, and the drama of introspection is the drama that the people want to see."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?""

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Most movies, even the good ones, are based upon the extraordinary incident and the exceptional character. In writing the stage play, it is necessary to contrive exciting moments of theater. Marty and The Mother are bundled together in one discussion because each represents in its own way the sort of material that does best on television. They both deal with the world of the mundane, the ordinary, and the untheatrical. The main characters are typical, rather than exceptional; the situations are easily identifiable by the audience; and the relationships are as common as people. The essence of these two shows lies in their literal reality. I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wire-tapped. I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Marty was a comment on the social values of our times."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"It is my current belief that the function of the writer is to give the audience some shred of meaning to the otherwise meaningless pattern of their lives. Our lives are filled with endless moments of stimulus and depression. We relate to each other in an incredibly complicated manner. Every fiber of relationship is worth a dramatic study. There is far more exciting drama in the reasons why a man gets married than in why he murders someone. The man who is unhappy in his job, the wife who thinks of a lover, the girl who wants to get into television, your father, mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends - all these are better subjects for drama than Iago. What makes a man ambitious? Why does one girl always try to steal her kid sister's boy friends? Why does your uncle attend his annual class reunion faithfully every year? Why do you always find it depressing to visit your father? These are the substances of good television drama; and the deeper you probe into and examine the twisted semiformed complexes of emotional entanglements, the more exciting your writing becomes."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Nearby is the boss, a man in his thirties. He is bent over a machine, working on it with a screw driver. The boss is really a pleasant man; he works under the illusion, however, that gruffness is a requisite quality of an executive."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"OLD LADY: I'm sixty-six years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. SON-IN-LAW: Missus Fanning . . . OLD LADY; An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what? [She is beginning to cry now] Is this what it all comes to?"

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"CHARLIE: That's what marriage is, Arnold. It's a job. You work at it. You work at it twenty-four hours a day. It's your job to make that person feel happy. You have to sit and think, "How am I going to make that person feel happy?" It's your job to make that other person happy. And, if your girl is halfway decent, she's going to make it her job to make you happy. Then you get to feel, I can depend on this person. And that's love, man. That's the greatest thing in the world. There's nothing like it. Arnold, I don't know how to explain this to you . . . but that's what my wife does for me. She's the one that makes life worth living."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"The writer [i.e. at rehearsals] should stay away from the actors except to let them know how much he is delighted by them. Actors, like everyone else in show business, need this constant reward. Don't flatter an actor unless he deserves it, but most professional actors, if they are responsive, will give you frequent cause for praise. Other than this, don't meddle with them. Actors will always come up to the writer, if he is around at rehearsals, and try to talk their parts out with him. The writer must refer them to the director. The director has his own idea of how to approach each actor, and advice from the writer will just confuse the actor and diffuse the director's authority."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"You don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog and I'm a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna get down on my knees and I'm gonna beg that girl to marry me."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month. You prefer lovers to husbands, hotels to homes. You'd rather grieve than live."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real. At least that's what you always tried to tell me, isn't it? That we shall never get rid of war by pretending it's unreal? It's the virtue of war that's the fraud, not war itself. It's the valor and the self-sacrifice and the goodness of war that needs the exposing. And here you are being brave and self-sacrificing, positively clanking with moral fervor, perpetuating the very things you detest merely to do "the right thing". Honestly, Charlie, your conversion to morality is really quite funny. All this time I've been terrified of becoming Americanized, and you, you silly ass, have turned into a bloody Englishman"

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?"

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?...I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?...And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!"

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, a football players. We're in the boredom-killing business."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems..."

- Paddy Chayefsky

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"I had always wondered what it felt like to die."

- Steven Pressfield

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"I have always found the spear to be a rather inelegant weapon"

- Steven Pressfield

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"You have never tasted freedom friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel."

- Steven Pressfield

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"If you think this is funny, wait 'till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical!"

- Steven Pressfield

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"There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight. [...] I was wrong."

- Steven Pressfield

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"I believe him, Dienekes. He's so fucking stupid, this is just the way he would skrew it up."

- Steven Pressfield

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"This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Do you love your country? [...] This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor."

- Steven Pressfield

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"The Soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The Soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces "pussy" in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this. When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleagured forces, is sufficiant, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory. This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse."

- Steven Pressfield

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"I approve of all you say, gentlemen. The fleet's needs are many and urgent. One, however, must take precedence. This item the men need before all, and we must get it for them without fail and without deferral. We must get the men a victory."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Both men were aware of the imperative held by all warrior races to serve honor before survival."

- Steven Pressfield

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"At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen."

- Steven Pressfield

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"A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the vetern."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon's eyes. "What do you call this, thou savage!" The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. "Are these God's footsteps?" Is this the 'path of holiness' in which your race treads?" Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman's shoulder. "This is not war," Lykos bellowed to Antiope. "It is butchery!" Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. "You cannot defend the indefensible!""

- Steven Pressfield

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"Bear your command with humility. Lead, do not condescend. Remember, these are great events and men will rise to them. Treat every man as a Soldier. He may surprise you and be one."

- Steven Pressfield

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"It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of the spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?"

- Steven Pressfield

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"The foe fell back. Our companies pushed through. For the time it takes to count to five hundred, I thought we might even conquer. For now the mulishness of the Athenian Soldier-farmer, the pigheaded refusal to yield which had at first been scorned by his betters-now this shone to the fore. By the gods, these clodkickers had learned how to fight! [...] They no longer fell apart at the apparition of cowardice among their comrades or themselves, but had come to understand that the same man may play the craven in the morning and the hero in the afternoon. Give them this: they were tough. Tougher than the Scyths and Getai, for all their savage valor, and tougher than the Amazons, despite their dash and dazzle."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance."

- Steven Pressfield

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"To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be."

- Steven Pressfield

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"The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death."

- Steven Pressfield

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"Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh."

- Steven Pressfield

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"One act I will never stand for is leaving our fellows behind. Bugger military protocol, or lofty notions of honour. I can't live with running out on a pal, and I won't let any of you do it either."

- Steven Pressfield

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"I could be counted upon to perform the mission they had assigned me, or, if that was unworkable, to improvise and turn my men's exertions upon a secondary undertaking as good as or better than the first."

- Steven Pressfield

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"I had become someone they could look to for leadership and direction, who would shield from meddling from above, and would ask no act of them that he wasn't prepared to perform himself. I provided for my men a framework within which they were freed to use their own qualities of courage, resourcefulness and tenacity."

- Steven Pressfield

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"The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. [...] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein."

- Steven Pressfield

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"These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons."

- Steven Pressfield

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"You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as-what is the word?-'amatuers.' But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field."

- Steven Pressfield

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"The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?"

- Steven Pressfield

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"I love a guy who knows how to bitch. Any moron can gripe about chow or rotations, but someone who can get exercised over architecture is my kind of dude."

- Steven Pressfield

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"In the end the American dream boils down to what? I'm getting mine and to hell with you."

- Steven Pressfield

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"1. If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, I would like someone to turn off the TV."

- Paul Rudnick

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"Wednesday (as Pocahontas): You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller." Becky (as Sarah Miller): Gary, she's changing the words! Wednesday (as Pocahontas): And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."

- Paul Rudnick

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"I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks."

- Paul Rudnick

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"There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came."

- Paul Rudnick

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"And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up."

- Paul Rudnick

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"Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It's okay, I'm from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, “Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey.”"

- Paul Rudnick

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"I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I know we've had our differences, Allie, and that we haven't seen eye to eye on everything. I'm not perfect, but I did the best I could with raising you. I'm your mother and I always will be. That means I'll always love you." Allie was silent for a moment, then: "What should I do?" "I don't know, Allie. That's up to you. But I would think about it. Think about what you really want."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I can't make this decision for you, Allie, this one's all yours. I want you to know, though, that I love you. And I always will. I know that doesn't help, but it's all I can do."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Follow your heart,"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I lead a simple life now, I am foolish, an old man in love, a dreamer who dreams of nothing but reading to Allie and holding her whenever I can. I am a sinner with many faults and a man who believes in magic, but I am too old to change and too old to care."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My Dearest Catherine, I miss you, my darling, as I always do, but today is especially hard because the ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Deanna's voice softened. "Theresa, I know there's a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can't. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can't do it for him." "I know that--" "But you don't," Deanna said, gently cutting her off. "Or if you do, you don't want to see it that way. Your vision, as they say, has become clouded.""

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Oh, Garrett, who do you think it was that brought the bottle to her?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It was...the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I can no more give Jamie away than I can give away my heart. But what I can do is let another share in the joy that she has always given me."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Even now, not a day goes by when I don't wish I could turn back the clock and change what happened."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"So many people these days, it seemed, believed that these things (personal fulfillment and self-esteem) could come only from work, not from parenting, and many people believed that having children had nothing to do with raising them."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Mitch...was the kind of man who added something to everything he touched and everyone he came in contact with. I was envious of his view on life. He saw it all as a big game, where the only way to win was to be good to other people, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Why? Do you want to rescue me, too, Taylor? … That's what you're trying to do, isn't it? … I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it's not what I need right now. I need to handle this my own way."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Loving someone and having them love you back is the most precious thing in the world. It's what made it possible for me to go on..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Where does a story truly start? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet these are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"There are ghosts and there is love, And both are present here, To those who listen, this tale will tell The truth of love and if it's near."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I don't want to be a grown-up. … Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"If it's over--if it's really over--then don't let it screw up the rest of your life."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"No," his father replied, "you ran for you. I just hope you're running toward something, not away from something."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over. Those two elements always go together. … The best we can hope for in life is that it doesn't happen for a long, long time."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"When I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"And don't worry. From wherever I am, I'll watch out for you. I'll be your guardian angel, sweetheart. You can count on me to keep you safe."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Nowadays, she thought, it was the little things in life that mattered. If the highlights in her past set the tone, it was the day-by-day events that now defined who she was."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"You know me better than anyone, and you're my best friend. I don't think there's anything you could say to me that would lead me to believe that you're doing it just to hurt me. If there's one thing I've come to know about you, it's that you're not even capable of something like that. Why do you think I like spending time with you so much? Because you're a good guy. A nice guy."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My mom used to tell me that whatever you do, marry someone who loves you more than you love him."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"She'd always believed that people come in two varieties: those who look out the windshield and those who stare in the rearview mirror. She'd always been the windshield type: Gotta focus on the future, not the past, because that's the only part that's still up for grabs."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...feeling her helplessness. There was nothing worse. Most people lived under the illusion that they were in control of their lives, but that wasn't completely true. Yeah, you could decide what to have for breakfast and what to wear and all those little things, but as soon as you stepped out into the world, you were pretty much at the mercy of everyone else around you, and all you could do was hope that if they were having a bad day, they wouldn't decide to take it out on you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...when two people live together, the stress flows both ways. This, I come to believe, is both the blessing and the curse of marriage. It's a blessing because there's an outlet for the everyday strains of life; it's a curse because the outlet is someone you care deeply about."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...she would fall in love with me again, just like she had a long time ago. And that's the most wonderful feeling in the world. How many people are ever given that chance? To have someone you love fall in love with you over and over?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"He had not only known that I would be coming to see him, I realized, but had anticipated the reason for my visit. And in typical southern fashion, he'd given me the answer to my problem, without my ever having to ask him directly."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I've come to believe that children live for the satisfaction of surprising their parents..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...there is the fact that having a child transforms the basic marriage relationship. No longer are you simply husband and wife, you are mother and father as well, and all spontaneity vanishes immediately."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"No, there's no experience quite like having children, and despite the challenges we once faced, I've considered myself blessed because of the family we created."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"But love, I've come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Marriage is about compromise, it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It isn't easy living with an author. I know this because my wife has informed me of this fact."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I've come to understand that arguing with her about it has never solved anything. So instead of denying it, I've learned to take her hands, look her in the eyes, and respond with those three magic words that every woman wants to hear: "You're right, sweetheart.""

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Writing is easy. It's just the typing that's hard."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My wife, I might add, is a saint. Either that, or maybe she is insane."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Denial is an ugly thing, Nicky." "I'm not in denial.""See what I mean? That's denial."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...the secret of a long lasting marriage is... ...communication. When we talk about issues and really open up to each other, things are great between us. When we keep things to ourselves, grudges and resentments build up and we end up arguing." ..."What good is talking if neither of you are really committed?...marriage comes down to actions. I think people talk too much about the things that bother them, instead of actually doing the little things that keep a marriage strong. You have to know what your spouse needs from you, and then you do it. And you avoid doing the things that harm the relationship. If your spouse acts the same way, your marriage can make it through anything."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...it was in her refusal to allow any of us to indulge in self-pity of any kind...through a maddening style of argument, in which the following three statements were repeated in various sequences: A. It's your life + social commentary. B. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things. C. No one ever said that life was fair."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Relationships are the most important thing in life, and friends are part of that."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Standing next to Micah, I realized that there were times when we talked not because we needed to communicate anything important, but simply because we each drew comfort from the other's voice."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitations, and the value of hard work and persistence."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Dreams are funny like that. You want something so desperately, you somehow get it, then just as suddenly it's over. Like running races--all that training for a couple of minutes on the track. The secret, I've learned, is to appreciate the process."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...you have to give them both credit for being good parents simply because of the way their kids turned out. We're happily married, successful, ethical, and we remained close as siblings. If your kids can say the same thing later in life, won't you think you did a good job as a parent?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Work, spirituality, family, friendships, health--you can't ignore any of them or it'll get you in the end."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My dad was a good man. A kind man... I...loved him for what he did. He'd foster independence, showed us the value of education, and taught us to be curious about the world. Even more important, he'd helped the three of us become close as siblings, which I consider to be the greatest gift of all. I could have asked for nothing more in a father. And really, who could?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Our stories are funny because we lived them, and we survived them. The worse the incident was when it was happening, the funnier the story had become to us over the years."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I tell Ryan that God gave him a brother like Miles so that Ryan could learn that anything is possible and that he can be good at anything. And I tell Miles that God gave him Ryan so that Miles could learn patience and persistence and how to overcome challeges."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be happy than busy."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"We'd been raised to survive, to meet challenges, and to chase our dreams. … And we don't only love each other, but like each other as well."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"One day, you're going to learn something that can't be explained with science. And when that happens, your life's going to change in ways you can't imagine."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My point is simply that kids turn out okay as long as the parents are involved, no matter where they live. It's not like small towns have a monopoly on values. I mean, I'm sure if I did some digging, I'd find lots of kids that were in trouble here, too. Kids are kids, no matter where they live."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I think it happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. And so you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on. It's perfectly normal."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"She didn't hide what she was thinking, she didn't try to impress him, nor was she swayed by anything he'd accomplished in the past. Instead she seemed to evaluate him as he was today, right now, without holding either the past or the future against him."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Love could be set in motion quickly, but true love needed time to grow into something strong and enduring. Love was, above all, about commitment and dedication and a belief that spending years with a certain person would create something greater than the sum of what the two could accomplish separately. Only time, however, could show whether you'd been accurate in your judgment."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"In her new, more mature incarnation, she embraced the idea that maturity meant thinking about risk long before you pondered the reward, and that success and happiness in life were as much about avoiding mistakes as making your mark in the world."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I'm of the opinion that anyone--even strangers--can sense the urgency of a request, and most people will usually do the right thing. … But when that didn't work, I offered to pay them."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Life was about spending time together, about having the time to walk together holding hands, talking quietly as they watched the sun go down. It wasn't glamorous, but it was, in many ways, the best that life had to offer. Wasn't that how the old saying went? Who, on their deathbed, ever said they wished they had worked harder? Or spent less time enjoying a quiet afternoon? Or spent less time with their family?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Sometimes the same emotion that breaks your heart is the very one that will heal it..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Is love at first sight truly possible?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It was like a vacation, one he hadn't planned for, but one that left him feeling more rested than he had in years. For the first time in what seemed like forever, he was choosing the pace of his life rather than his life choosing the pace. Being bored, he decided, was an underrated art form."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Does trust have to be earned? Or is it simply a matter of faith?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...but what I eventually came to understand was that if a woman truly loves you, you can't always expect her to tell the truth. You see, women are more attuned to feelings than men are, and if they're not being truthful, more often than not it's because they think the truth might hurt your feelings. But it doesn't mean they don't love you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...The one thing you've got to remember is to see the big picture. When things get tough, remind yourself why you fell in love with her in the first place. She's a special woman, and you were lucky to find her, just as she was lucky to find you. She's got a heart of gold, and you can't fake something like that."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Well, then I'd say it takes two to tango. My guess is that both of you are right and both of you are wrong. That's the way most arguments go, anyway. People are who they are and no one is perfect, but marriage is about becoming a team. You're going to spend the rest of your life learning about each other, and every now and then, things blow up. But the beauty of marriage is that if you picked the right person and you both love each other, you'll alway figure out a way to get through it."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...What's going on with you two, all this stress you're both under...that's called life. And life has a tendency to throw curveballs when you least expect them. Every couple has ups and downs, every couple argues, and that's the thing--you're a couple, and couples can't function without trust. You have to trust him, and he's got to trust you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Like I said, you're in this together. Men have certain needs, women have different needs; that's the way it was hundreds of years ago, and that's the way it's going to be hundreds of years from now. If you both realize that, and you both work on meeting each other's needs, you'll have a good marriage. And part of that, for both of you, is trust. In the end, it's that simple."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Kids are people, too, and once they start getting older, they make their own decisions. There's only so much you can do."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...once she becomes a teenager...well, sometimes there's nothing you can do. With or without you, in the end, children grow up to become the people they were meant to be."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...having children changes your life like nothing else. It'll be the hardest and best thing you've ever done."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...suddenly certain that what he was doing now was the sole reason he'd been placed on this earth. To love another. To care for someone else, to help another person, to carry her worries until she was strong enough to carry them on her own. To care for someone unconditionally, for in the end that was what gave life meaning."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart. Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...(in the army) you're forced to learn the most important lesson in life, and that's the fact that you have to live up to your responsibilities, and you better do it right. When given an order, you can't say no. It's no exaggeration to say that lives are on the line. One wrong decision, and your buddy might die. It's this fact that makes the army work. That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. ...but when all is said and done, we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...good teachers are priceless. They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it." "Because they're passionate about their subjects."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...when you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...She had the rare ability to be exactly what people needed when she was with them and yet still remain true to herself."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I knew my dad was a good man, a kind man, and though he'd led a wounded life, he'd done the best he could in raising me."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...I learned that it's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief...lessens. It may not ever go away completely, but after a while it's not overwhelming."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...I finally understood what true love really meant. ...that love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are those in which the ending is a surprise."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It went without saying that he felt guilty about what had happened, but married friends had assured him that guilt was the cornerstone of any good marriage. It meant that a conscience was at work, values were held in high esteem, and reasons to feel guilty were best avoided whenever possible."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes were made, regrets form, and all the was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"No pretenses, no attempts to impress, no one trying to show anyone up."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Parents might believe themselves to be the bosses, but in the end it was the kids who made the rules."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending, wearing masks and losing themselves in the process."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"That was one of the great things about being single: A person could pretty much do what he wanted, whenever he wanted, and introspection was only an option."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Was living together a step toward the future or just a way to continue the present?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Traveling has less to do with seeing things than experiencing them...."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"But I'm different now than i was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I'd been at the beginning. And I'll be different tomorrow than I am today. And what that means is that I can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it wouldn't be the same. My experience wouldn't be the same. To me, that's what traveling should be about. Meeting people, learning to not only appreciate a different culture, but really enjoy it like a local, following whatever impulse strikes you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"'He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'...'Blessed are the lazy who lie in boats, for they shall inherit a suntan.'"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...people are pretty much the same. Especially through adolescence and early adulthood. For the most part, people go through the same experiences and think the same thing, but somehow on one ever escapes the belief that his experience is unique in every conceivable way."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"In other words, when the going get tough, the tough get going."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Love is a wonderful thing. It makes life worthwhile. I love being in love." "Spoken like a man with plenty of experience. But keep in mind that true love lasts forever." "Poets would say that true love always ends in tragedy."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...he realized that the same thing that made women initially attractive to him--their need to be taken care of--was the very thing that eventually signaled he end of the relationship. How did that old saying go? If you've been divorced once, you might be right in thinking your ex was the problem. If you've been divorced three times? Well, folks, the problem is most definitely you. Granted, he hadn't been divorced, but the point was well taken."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Finding a woman with a sense of humor had been the one piece of advice his father had given him when he'd first begun to get serious about dating, and he finally understood why his dad had considered it important. If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"But would she do it differently if she could? She doubted it. Her experiences growing up ad formed her into the woman that she'd become, just as his experiences had formed him, and she didn't regret them. And yet...she knew that wasn't the question that mattered. ...she realized the choice before her was this: Where do I go from here? It is never too late to change things."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"How far should a person go in the name of true love?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Thinking back, he recalled events he wished he could change, tears he wished had never been shed, time that could have been better spent, and frustrations he should have shrugged off. Life, it seemed, was full of regret, and he yearned to turn back the clock so he could live parts of his live over again. One thing was certain: He should have been a better husband."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...people always said that parenting and worrying were synonymous..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...he often wondered when exactly her feeling for him finally overwhelmed those she'd had for Kevin... He wasn't sure; capturing a specific instant like that was no more possible than locating a specific drop of water in the ocean."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"These days, it seemed that the only thing he was certain about was the knowledge that he wouldn't trade his years with Gabby for anything. Without her, his life had little meaning. He was a small-town husband with a small-town occupation and his cares were no different from anyone else's. He'd been neither a leader nor a follower, nor had he been someone who would be remembered long after he passed away. He was the most ordinary of men with only one exception: He'd fallen in love with a woman named Gabby, his love deepening in the years they'd been married. But fate had conspired to ruin all that, and now he spent long periods of his days wondering whether it was humanly possible to fix things between them."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Marriage, each of them realized intuitively, was about compromise and forgiveness. It was about balance, where one person complemented the other."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"You're doing the best you can, right? Isn't that what we always tell each other?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"He loved his wife but hated what life with her had become, cursing himself for even thinking this way."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present...yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...He was with the woman and daughters he loved, and who could ever need or want anything more than that?...It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all, it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...There is a greater purpose to all this. It is your destiny."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...she was struck by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"That's what courage is. If she weren't scared, she wouldn't need courage in the first place."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...people who are grieving have to want to move on--that first step, that motivating spark, has to come from within them. And when it does, it opens the door to the unexpected."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Love doesn't mean anything if you're not willing to make a commitment, and you have to think not only about what you want, but about what he wants. Not just now, but in the future."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I just tell people what they already know but are afraid to admit to themselves."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Maybe I don't want to be defined by what I do. Maybe I'd like to be defined by what I am."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Long-term relationships--the ones that matter--are all about weathering the peaks and valleys."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Dying is a strange business, and I'm not going to bore you with the details. I might have weeks or I might have months and though it's a cliche, it's true that so many of the things I once believed to be important no longer are. ...I find myself reflecting on the essential moments of my life."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between a life of transient safety and one of riskier rewards...and that in the darkest hour, love is the only true safe haven."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"He knew that Amanda would always be the very best part of him, the self he would always long to know."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were. She knew Tuck understood that more than anyone."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...he had the sense that they were both lonely, albeit in different ways. He was a solitary figure in a vast landscape while she was a face in a nameless crowd."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were,..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...the grass isn't always greener on the other side. What the younger generation didn't understand was that the grass was greener where it's watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn't constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"You have to understand that I'm not the girl I used to be. I'm a wife and a mother now, and like everyone else I'm not perfect. I struggle with the choices I've made and I make mistakes, and half the time I wonder who I really am or what I'm doing or whether my life means anything at all. I'm not special at all, Dawson, and you need to know that. You have to understand that I'm just...ordinary."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"The past was gone, after all, and the future was the only thing they had left."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...there'd also been an unvarnished honestly in what they'd said. There were no hidden meanings, no secret attempts to pass judgment; as quickly as their disagreements had flared up, they'd pass."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"But trust me when I say that memories are funny things. Sometimes they're real, but other times they change into what we want them to be... But like I said, she's hurting, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that people in pain don't always see things as clearly as they should... And if it somehow doesn't work out between you, then you've got to understand that you can't look back anymore. It'll destroy you in the end, and destroy her as well. Neither one of you can keep living with regret, because it drains the life right out of you, and the very idea is enough to break my heart."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"...I said everything that matters... Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I sometimes think to myself that I’m the last of my kind."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"His voice, even now, follows me everywhere on this longest of rides, this thing called life."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"What's your horse's name?""Horse.""Sophia waited for the joke, but it didn't come. "You call your horse 'Horse'?""He doesn't mind.""You should give him a noble name. Like Prince or Chief or something.""It might confuse him now.""Trust me. Anything is better than Horse. It's like naming a dog Dog.""I have a dog named Dog. Australian Cattle Dog." He turned, his expression utterly matter-of-fact. "Great herder.""And your mom didn't complain?""My mom named him."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I had never dreamed of being a soldier; I had never fired a gun. I was not, nor ever had been, a fighter of any sort, but even so, I loved my country, and I spent much of that year trying to imagine a future distorted by war."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"As your father used to say, we shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"The words nearly break my heart, and I feel something crumble inside me. The truth is often a terrible thing, and I wish again that I were someone else. But it is too late now, too late to change anything. I am old and alone and I'm dying a little more with each passing hour. I'm tired, more tired than I've ever been."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"While she was exceptional, I was average, a man whose major accomplishment in life was to love her without reservation, and that would never change."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"It was the way you looked at me while I looked at the art that changed me. It is you, in other words, who changed."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"As much as I love her, I admit that she has always remained somewhat of an enigma to me...I liked this about her. I liked the mystery she added to my life. I liked the occasional silence between us, for ours was a comfortable silence. It was a passionate silence, one that had its roots in comfort and desire."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"In this world, after all, I've become more or less invisible...I've become what the young are afraid of becoming, just another member of the nameless elderly, an old and broken man with nothing left to offer to this world.My days are inconsequential, comprising simple moments and even simpler pleasures. I eat and sleep and think of Ruth; I wander the house and stare the the paintings, and in the mornings, I feed the pigeons that gather in my backyard."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My marriage brought great happiness into my life, but lately there's been nothing but sadness. I understand that love and tragedy go hand in hand, for there can't be one without the other, but nonetheless I find myself wondering whether the tradeoff is fair. A man should die as he had lived, I think; in his final moments, he should be surrounded and comforted by those he's always loved."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"You are a smart man, Ira, but sometimes I think you do not understand women very well."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this..."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"A truth emerges in any long marriage, and the truth is this: Our spouses sometimes know us better than we even know ourselves."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist's palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"My plea to you is this: despite your sadness, do not forget how happy you have made me; do not forget that I loved a man who loved me in return, and this was the greatest gift I could ever hope to receive."

- Nicholas Sparks

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"[Written on back of photograph of Ruth and Daniel] "Ruth LevinsonThird grade teacher.She believes in me and I can be anything I want when I grow up.I can even change the world.""

- Nicholas Sparks

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"'If there is a heaven, we will find each other again, for there is no heaven without you.'"

- Nicholas Sparks

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"In an empirical sense, extremist art is a unified confirmation of one’s resistance to and transcendence of status quo thinking."

- Nick Zedd

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"Today’s smut is tomorrow’s fine art. The profane, with the passage of time becomes sacred. Having suffered under a reactionary ontological hermeneutics for the last fifty years, the extremist movement constitutes an emergent phenomenon which is more than the sum of the processes from which it has emerged. Interpretation theory rewarded by dominant culture would have us believe that history is objective when in fact its subjective nature is based on hierarchical systems of exploitation benefiting a global elite."

- Nick Zedd

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"Now that contemporary art, a system that stands for privilege, nepotism and political connections is finally dying, get out of the fucking way."

- Nick Zedd

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"The Simulation imposed upon us by shadow governments and hidden elites must be exposed and destroyed. That includes a cancerous art establishment based on commerce and the malignant dictums of predatory capitalism that negates individual breakthroughs based on lived experience."

- Nick Zedd

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"We are the new extremists, armed with a vision to see through the charade imposed upon us by the gatekeepers of consensus reality, who manage a mass hallucination we choose to reject."

- Nick Zedd

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"Extremist art is non-metaphysical, based on the senses."

- Nick Zedd

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"King is probably one of three men of this century that I'll call heroic. A fantastic man as far as I'm concerned, for all that he did."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"I would think a faith in God is one thing. I think that if we could change the whole world and keep the land is another thing. Change things yet keep keep the relationship is another thing."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"In dialogue, I’m dealing with the sounds I’ve heard. One of the reasons I often write from first person or multiple points of view is to hear the voices of different characters. Omniscient narration becomes a problem because, for me, the omniscient is my own voice narrating the story and then bringing in characters for dialogue."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"When people hear stories, they identify more closely with the characters. When I read aloud, people always come up to me and say, “I understand it much better now that I’ve heard you read it. I can hear the characters’ voices much clearer…”"

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"I was never threatened…I never knew anyone who was lynched. But there was subtle racism every day of my life. You could not speak to a white man unless he spoke to you first. On the sidewalk, I’d have to move so a white person could walk by."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"(Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

- Ernest J. Gaines

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"Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror."

- William H. Macy

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"It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence."

- William H. Macy

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"To see your own visage up there, it's terrifying. I have to see a film twice, the first time just to get over the shock: the fact that my face seems to be dripping off my skull into my chest."

- William H. Macy

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"People have said, in one form or another, your diction is too good. At first you think, are you insane? And then I realised, I spent so much time in the theatre, and Mamet was such a stickler about that and I am, too – that I had been spoilt. It's a cute acting trick, this whispering, mumbling thing. I realised a long time ago, when people are mumbling or whispering they're either talking about sex, or money, or lying. So if you're not doing that, you'd better speak up."

- William H. Macy

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"I don't understand it completely … but she adores me. She thinks I'm funny. … My attitude towards communication has always been: it's a slippery slope, because you start communicating, the next thing you know you're going to be talking to each other, the next thing you know you're going to be feeling things, and then you'll be living your life and I want no part of that. … So I tried to avoid that stuff, but she forces it upon me."

- William H. Macy

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"I could become a hermit if I'm not careful; I like that. When people on Facebook say stay in touch – I don't want to stay in touch. I don't want anyone to know where I am."

- William H. Macy

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"I think it's possible to be too quick-witted, too smart to be an actor. You have to turn off a lot of your brain, in a way. When you see a fellow actor just missing it, it's hard to keep your mouth shut, but you have to. Or see a director so stupid he couldn't direct vomit into a paper bag. And he's in charge, and it's really hard to keep your mouth shut."

- William H. Macy

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"There is something in his blue indignant eyes, at once credulous and vaguely accusing, that both expresses Macy's outlook – deadpan, sardonic, winningly self-critical – and explains his appeal as an actor."

- William H. Macy

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"I Could Never Have Sex With Any Man Who Has So Little Regard For My Husband."

- Dan Greenburg

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""I'm sorry I ever met you" is effective enough, but how much more piquant is the same communication expressed as: "I rue the day I met you"."

- Dan Greenburg

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"In my view there can be no affirmative action without segregation-nor any end to the segregation if our names must be kept on separate lists. I'd like to propose instead a simple scenario: a fair job market where employment is commensurate with ability regardless of gender, racial or ethnic background. I make a pitch, they like my story, I get the job. Why not ?"

- Migdia Chinea Varela

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"Today's Real Man is probably closest to Spencer Tracy or Gary Cooper in spirit; he realizes that while birds, flowers, poetry, and small children do not add to the quality of life in quite the same manner as a Super Bowl and six-pack of Budweiser, he's learned to appreciate them anyway."

- Bruce Feirstein

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"When Melinda filed for divorce, she wrote down only two words as her reason for seeking a dissolution of our two-year marriage: Incontrovertibly self-absorbed. Or is that three words? No matter. The question I have is: Did she mean me or her?"

- Eric Garcia

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"I signed up for the sake of a uniform. I was not the first, and I will not be the last."

- Eric Garcia

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"Like me, he would turn to the one thing that had always sustained him through difficult times, the one piece of hide-saving equipment with which the military way of life had vested us: We could kill people and not care all that much."

- Eric Garcia

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"Due to the nature of my profession, I’ve been around death quite a lot, and while I’m not exactly on a first-name basis with the Reaper, we’ve exchanged business cards enough times to give each other a friendly nod when we pass by on the job."

- Eric Garcia

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"True loneliness, I learned that day, isn’t the lack of others. It’s the lack of others quickly."

- Eric Garcia

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"“We had a good day,” Tig said, slapping me on the back. “Got a whole mess of ’em, didn’t we? Two fifty-eight confirmed.” “Forget the numbers. You woke up this morning, and you’re going to sleep tonight. In my book, that’s a good day.” In recent months, I have adopted Tig’s philosophy."

- Eric Garcia

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"I like to think that she was right. And I would have responded, but soon our talk show came on, and we stopped worrying about ourselves and each other and started worrying about celebrities."

- Eric Garcia

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"I recognize that the career draws applicants from a certain psychological pool. Garrett came from somewhere near the shallow end."

- Eric Garcia

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"I tell the truth, but I don’t need to divulge everything."

- Eric Garcia

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"“Son,” he said, “you’re going to work in this life, and you’re going to play. And when the last days come, you’ll look back and find that that’s all there was, and endless stream of days going back to today. But if you can find the thing you should be doing, the thing that makes you you, and if you can make that thing yours, then you’ve beaten the game. I haven’t. Most men don’t. You probably won’t, either, but the point is to try, and to never give up, even when you think it’s over.”"

- Eric Garcia

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"Thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my personal beliefs. I believe that everyone thinks they can write. This is not true. It is true, however, that everyone can direct. I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis. I believe that what doesn't kill us makes us bitter. I believe that the obsessive worship of movie, TV and sports figures is less likely to produce spiritual gain than praying to Thor. I believe that Larry was a vastly underrated Stooge, without whom Moe and Curly could not conform to the comedy law of three (thanks, Lee). I believe my kids are secretly proud of me. I believe that if you can't find anything nice to say about people whom you've helped to make wildly successful and then they stabbed you in the back, then don't say anything at all. I believe I have a great dog, maybe the greatest dog in the whole wide world, yes, he is! I believe that beer is a gateway drug that leads, inevitably, to vodka and somebody oughta do something about it. I believe that when ABC reads this, I'm gonna be in biiiig trouble. I believe that Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High", is the greatest rock song ever recorded. Once again, thanks for watching "Dharma & Greg". Please be sure to tune in again to this vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Once again, thank you for video-taping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some more of my beliefs. I believe that the guy who invented those speed bumps in the freeway that snap you back into consciousness when you're drifting into a nearby semi should be given a big hug. I believe that there are actually several cures for the summertime blues. I believe that in my earlier statement of beliefs, I erroneously believed that beer was a gateway drug that led to vodka. After intensive consultation with ABC executives, I now believe I was very, very wrong. Beer is good. Especially beer brewed by major manufacturers, and enjoyed in a responsible fashion. I believe I've spent my life expecting people to behave in a certain way. I believe that when they didn't behave according to my expectations, I became angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful. I believe these expectations are the reason I've been angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful more than I care to admit. As a result, I now believe my expectations are the real problem. I believe that everyone has this very same problem, and they ought to start acting accordingly. Well, that's all for now. I hope you continue to watch "Dharma & Greg" and check in on my vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Once again, thanks for video-taping "Dharma & Greg," and freeze-framing on my vanity card. The following are a few more of my beliefs: I believe that El Niño is an international conspiracy perpetrated by evil roofing contractors. I believe it's high time The Beatles came clean on that whole "Paul is dead" thing. I believe that anyone who can read and speak clearly can be a network news anchorperson -- but not necessarily a weatherman. I believe that if I rid myself of insatiable cravings, lusts, paranoia, deep-seated anger and ill-will towards others, I'll be a much better person. I believe that TV is the cause of all the violence and immorality in our society -- ha! just kidding. I believe there's no business like show business, although if you're over-paid for feeding a big, scary monster, then that might be sort of like it. That's all for now, gotta go make a TV show. Once again, thanks for watching and keep checking for more of my beliefs real soon!"

- Chuck Lorre

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"I believe I'm growing skeptical of cynicism."

- Chuck Lorre

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"I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that if you've read this far in my vanity plate you are an extraordinary person infused with great love and compassion. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. (thanks, Jeff) I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Well, once again I'd like to thank you for not only watching, but videotaping "Dharma & Greg." I know you're busy, so this shows a wonderful commitment on your part and I want you to acknowledge that commitment with a big ol' Chuck Lorre vanity card hug. Okay, with that done let's get on with why you're here, to learn more of my personal beliefs. I believe that this episode, which on the surface deals with a funny Valentine's adventure, in fact grapples with the weighty issue of Weltschmerz. Weltschmerz is a German word which loosely means "world suffering deriving from the inevitability of reality to never match up with our expectations." Boy, only the Germans could come up with a word like that. Anyway, in this episode Greg is in Weltschmerz hell as he discovers that life is never quite like the brochure. Dharma, on the other hand, recognizes that life is a flowing river and happiness exists only when one embraces its ever-changing nature. From this dilemma we draw the comedic essence of our story. Finally, I believe that when I retire and teach sitcom writing at a community college, I'll use this theme for one of my classes to impress the kids."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Once again, thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. For those of you who are new, this is my sporadic attempt to share my personal beliefs with millions of people (hence the term "vanity"). This attempt has led me into communicating many deep thoughts, and, I'm afraid to say, quite a few shallow ones as well. But what I've found most interesting is that after a few weeks, I've discovered myself scrounging for new beliefs. Things about which I could stand up and say with pride, "I believe in this, dammit!" Now that's not to say that I couldn't fill the card with a lot of mindless aphorisms. But do I waste my precious moment in the sun by proclaiming, "I believe that sex with multiple partners in a moving vehicle isn't all it's cracked up to be?" No, I do not. Do I squander this priceless opportunity to announce, "I believe we are better than the animals because we're capable of reading in the bathroom?" Once again, I do not. And so it is for this reason, I have no beliefs to share with you this week. No wait... actually I do believe that JFK had a much better understanding of the word "perks"."

- Chuck Lorre

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"No need to freeze frame this one!"

- Chuck Lorre

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"United we stand."

- Chuck Lorre

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"My lawyer ate my vanity card."

- Chuck Lorre

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"I got nothin'."

- Chuck Lorre

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"You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You broke that poor girl's heart. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You should've told the truth right from the start. But my intentions were good. I was no slave to my wood. I wanted her to love me for me. He does have lots of riches, which attracts a lot of bitches. Thank you, Alan, but you'll never be on "Glee." Aw, crap. If I may throw in my two cents, your love was based on a pretense. Your relationship with mother is to blame. You didn't suckle on her boobies, you self-medicate with doobies, which explains why you used a made-up name. Cue da refrain. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. Everything you said was a lie. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. But you're still a really, really handsome guy. Thank you. Then what am I to do? So I don't always live with you. Wow, that hurts my feelings, but since I live there beneath your ceilings, I'll bite the pillow like the prison bitches do. Oooh! If she gives me one more chance, we can have a real romance. If she doesn't, we can party in my pants. 'Scuse me, no disrespect, but I have to interject, what makes you think you can steal the show? 'Cause I'm gay! Oh, you're so clearly from L.A. Yeah, I'm gay. And he will always be that way. I'm gay. Or as his Jersey friends would say: A-yo, badda bing, he's a big ol' 'mo. 'Scuse me, but we seem to be digressing, and I find it to be quite distressing. Can we sing about the problem that's at hand? Can Kate get over Sam and love who I am? You confuse me for someone who gives a damn. So bottom line, you're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And I'll die sad and alone. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. (Ring!) Hold it, everybody, that's my phone. Hello? Kate? You're a douche. (Click!) Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, douche. Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, oooh, you're a douche... you're a dou- You couldn't say it meaner. I'm a big vagina cleaner. Didn't do what I oughta. I'm vinegar and water. On this we all agree. Oh yes, we all agree. Oh good, you finally see, to shining sea. Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Drum roll... You're a douche, you're a douche, just a big, fizzy douche. And that's all I'll ever be. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And that's all you'll ever be. Douche!"

- Chuck Lorre

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"Still got nothin'."

- Chuck Lorre

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"In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Gratitude."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear me. Happy birthday to me. (And 20 more would be nice)"

- Chuck Lorre

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"Dear Alf, I'm your number one fan. I like you because you're an alien but you're funny, unlike my brother who's an alien but just a jerk. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your time here on our planet and have found things to eat other than cats. I recommend chicken nuggets. Sincerely, Missy Cooper, age 10. P.S. My favorite color is pink. What's yours?"

- Chuck Lorre

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"Connie Tucker is proud to announce that she is sweet on Dr. John Sturgis and they are officially a romantic couple."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Scrabble fans might be troubled to see 3 Y tiles in tonight's episode. Fear not. The "Super Scrabble" version of the game actually comes with 4 Y tiles. Disaster averted."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Congratulations Young Sheldon, for reaching 100 episodes!"

- Chuck Lorre

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"The Writers Guild of America, of which I am a proud member, is on strike. While I'm pretty sure vanity cards are not covered under the pre-existing contract (I've certainly never been paid to write them), I still feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor unrest (truth be told, I feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor rest). Now that I think about it, I'm also uncomfortable with the word "labor". While I've put in very long hours over the years (70 hour weeks were not unusual), I've mostly been sitting on my ass, staring at a computer screen and wondering what comes next (maybe a writers strike should be called "ruminating unrest"). Regardless, I don't want to do anything that inadvertently helps the evil empire, so until a fair and equitable solution can be found, I'm going to walk around in a circle waving a stick with a sign. An activity that more closely resembles "labor"."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Back in the days of network television, a vanity card in the end credits was a means by which writer-producers could express their creative dominion over the just-viewed show. It was dubbed a vanity card because vanity was all it had going for it. The actual producer of the show was the company that financed the show - that took the financial risk. The hierarchy was simple, the writer-producer couldn't fire the company, but the company could fire the writer-producer. I can vouch for this because I've been fired. A couple of times. But here we are now in the world of streaming television. On the plus side, a world where end credits are barely viewed by anyone. The viewer is actually encouraged to skip over them and quickly re-engage with another episode, or a different show or movie. Which brings me back to vanity cards. Why on Earth am I writing vanity cards for Bookie? My friends and family won't bother to read them. They might not even be able to find them. One might say, "If a vanity card is written on Max, and no one reads it, was it amusing?" Fuck if I know."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Hi! It's been awhile. Haven't written a vanity card in what? Nine, ten months? There was a writers' strike. An actors' strike. A directors'... oh well, doesn't matter now. We're all friends. Colleagues. The folks who go to Sun Valley and the folks who go to San Fernando Valley are all on the same team. Thrilling audiences around the world. Making 'em laugh, making 'em cry. Making 'em wonder when this friggin' movie is gonna be over. I think I can speak for the thousands of people in show business I've never met, when I say we are very grateful to be back at work. Because it's only when we're working, do we have any sense of self-worth. But that might just be me."

- Chuck Lorre

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"As I'm sure you know, network television has been undergoing seismic changes. Audiences have so many more choices than ever before, which I believe it's a good thing. The only difficulty is it's hard to measure what constitutes success. In the past, if you enjoyed tonight's premiere episode of Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, I'd asked you to spread the word. Get some word of mouth going. That's no longer necessary. Now all I need is an algorithm, or bot, or some sort of silicon-based magical genie to secure the future of the show. Hey, Siri! Mm-hmm?"

- Chuck Lorre

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"Heads up. I'm only writing this one card for Season 2 of Bookie. The reason is no one, not even my family and friends, bothers to read them. It's not surprising. Max actively dissuades viewers from reading end credits, let alone sticking around to read the mischievous word salad that is a classic Chuck Lorre vanity card. They want you, for their own selfish reasons, to immediately leap into the next episode or, failing that, MILF Manor. So once again, do not bother looking for a new card at the end of the remaining 7 episodes of Bookie. There won't be one. Will the world be a poorer place? I like to think so. If you're hungry for a peek inside my fiendishly clever mind. I still have a show with easily accessible vanity cards on CBS. Ask your grandma what that is and where it can be found."

- Chuck Lorre

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"To the crew of LAFD Fire Truck 14, You saved my home. You made a snap decision to stop a rampaging fire that had already destroyed my neighbor's house. In doing so, you spared me incredible heartache. There are no words that can adequately express my gratitude. Maybe I can buy all you guys a nice dinner and you can watch a grown man cry tears of joy over his chicken parm, let me know."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Getting the jump on David Ellison, Netflix, Apple, and Comcast, Chuck Lorre has offered to pay one million dollars in cash for Warner Bros. Discovery. To sweeten the pot, Mr. Lorre will include two weeks at a time-share condo in CABO (not Christmas), if WBD agrees to keep the Discovery channels."

- Chuck Lorre

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"Working at Warner Bros. is like being raised by a single mom who keeps bringing home strange men!"

- Chuck Lorre

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"The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’"

- Ben Hecht

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"The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status."

- Ben Hecht

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"Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away."

- Ben Hecht

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"The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write."

- Ben Hecht

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"Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist."

- Ben Hecht

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"I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers."

- Ben Hecht

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"When I come to put down their names, there weren't many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list ... Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft."

- Ben Hecht

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"Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred."

- Ben Hecht

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"They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep, and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list...their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness."

- Ben Hecht

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"Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley."

- Ben Hecht

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"Gibbons is a man full of pain and violence. On this night, there is a Witch's Sabbath in his heart. Storms are blowing his world to bits and great troubles are pounding him on a reef."

- Ben Hecht

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"The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me."

- Ben Hecht

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"You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?"

- Ben Hecht

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"Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director, and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop."

- Ben Hecht

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"In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."

- Ben Hecht

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"The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links."

- Ben Hecht

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"People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized."

- Ben Hecht

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"I was afraid you would think I was bragging."

- Ben Hecht

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"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

- Ben Hecht

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"There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age."

- Ben Hecht

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"The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them."

- Ben Hecht

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"Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself."

- Ben Hecht

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"Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty."

- Ben Hecht

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"Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade."

- Ben Hecht

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"A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."

- Ben Hecht

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"The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people."

- Ben Hecht

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"How My Egoism Died"

- Ben Hecht

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"A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands."

- Ben Hecht

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"Half of me wants to be this difficult, rebellious enfant terrible who is pissing everyone off and doing whatever I want to do, and the other half of me is this Jewish kid from Chicago that just wants everyone to like him and hates conflict and hates yelling and wants everyone to get along, and be nice. That’s the part that’s very Chicago."

- Graham Moore (writer)

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"I had been this huge computer nerd my entire life. I went to space camp and computer programming camp. I was that kid. From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing – among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, ‘it’s a mathematician that you’ve never heard of.’ When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I’d do anything to write this film, I’d write it for free. It was all about luck and passion. That is how it started, and I felt that everyone else involved was just as committed to the story."

- Graham Moore (writer)

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"What is amazing about the story is that the most fantastic things that occur, that people most don't believe, are absolutely true — like the Soviet mole that they allowed to operate within British war intelligence — that was all true. … We condensed the timeline, essentially. The process of breaking the code was enormously complicated in real life. So one of things we wanted to do was open up Turing's story to the audience and make a film about these complicated topics, but at the same time create a narrative that the audience understands, without insulting their intelligence. But the on a broad conceptual level, everything is true."

- Graham Moore (writer)

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"Here’s the thing. Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. I do. And that’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I wanted to do was say this: When I was 16-years-old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here — and so I would like this moment to be for this kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird, stay different — and then, when it’s your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."

- Graham Moore (writer)

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"I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. … I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless I always identified with him so much."

- Graham Moore (writer)

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"I am the unknown Will, The Anger that threatens glory and ruin: Lord of Storms am I, in heaven high and caverns deep. I am the Father of the War, Odin for you, Wotan for him, Wayfarer, Wanderer, beggar, king, numen, genius, strength and ring."

- Artur Balder

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"Little Spain is a symbol of the first attempt of a successful Hispanic immigration process to the United States … Almost no one knows that there was a "Little Spain" in Manhattan, just like there's a "Little Italy." That's what's fascinating."

- Artur Balder

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"With Little Spain, director Artur Balder takes good advantage of focusing on a wave of immigration that went on until the 1970s. Through archival footage and direct interviews with immigrants and their children, Balder successfully illustrates the moods, flavors and excitement of recreating a far-away home in a small radius of Manhattan city blocks. … Little Spain — the film — records a multi-dimensional perspective of integration among immigrants from different backgrounds as a key part of integration into a host country."

- Artur Balder

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"My corn I take serious because it's my corn, and my potatoes and my tomatoes and fences I take note of because they're mine. But this war is not mine and I take no note of it!"

- James Lee Barrett

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"There's nothing much I can tell you about this war. It's like all wars, I suppose. The undertakers are winning it. Oh, the politicians will talk a lot about the "glory" of it, and the old men'll talk about the "need" of it—the soldiers, they just want to go home."

- James Lee Barrett

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"It's all false pressure; you put the heat on yourself, you get it from the networks and record companies and movie studios. You put more pressure on yourself to make everything that much harder. You say, 'Well, I'll get all screwed up and then it'll be a real challenge again.' So stupid—I've often wondered why people do these things. You're so much happier if you don't, but I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time."

- John Belushi

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"I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can I not get some pleasure for myself?"

- John Belushi

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"I owe it all to little chocolate donuts."

- John Belushi

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"I just love cocaine."

- John Belushi

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"Love is the closest thing to laughter and the closest thing to tears. Love is the motive power of everything in the universe that has beauty in it. Love is the reason for everything and the reward for everything. It’s always seemed strange to me that we have to use the word love for so many things. And yet when you come to think of it, that’s all right, too, because love is in everything in some form or another. Without it, I imagine the flowers would stop blooming and the sun would stop shining and people would stop laughing, and even the rain wouldn’t fall. So love is always growth. I think if I could have just one word for love—it would be understanding. Love must always be unselfish, and strangely enough, love is the only thing in the world that ever is unselfish. And if it isn’t unselfish, it’s only a counterfeit of love."

- Harold Lloyd

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"I find that I would like now, best of all, to be a good conversationalist. I know I'm not one at present. Oh, I can sit and talk a little of this and that, but I realize that I haven't any definite or profound knowledge. I won't be satisfied with just a patter, a surface glaze of information. I don't want short-cuts to learning. I want to know all about the thing I study. I'd like to be able to hold my own, to meet on a common ground, with scientists, inventors, clerics, doctors, athletes, authors. The most worthwhile thing in life is to store your mind with knowledge. I wish now that I had been able to go to college, if only so that I might have had appreciations earlier in the game. People often say to me now that I have my home, my career, fame (if you call it that), there must be nothing left for me to live for. But there is everything left to live for. All the things I don't know about, all the things I want to know about. Pictures, I've discovered, were practically all I did know about up to very recently. I've had to work so hard, to concentrate so closely, that I never have had time to read or to travel or to think about other things. I'm just at the beginning of living..."

- Harold Lloyd

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"I love competition. I'd rather have to fight and worry than be peaceful and secure, any day. I've found that I'm a peaceful, easy-going sort of a fellow about all the small things in life. But when a big issue comes along and when I feel I'm right about it—well, I guess I'm pretty stubborn. Even nasty. I've taken up golf. I'm crazy about it. Doug Fairbanks and I play every day that we can get away from work. I not only like the game a lot, but I want to master it. I'm not satisfied just to play golf. I want to be good at it. That's the way I've come to feel about everything."

- Harold Lloyd

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"I find that I have great faith in human nature. I believe that people are good. I believe they are to be trusted. So far as I know, no one has ever betrayed my faith, in any way. If they ever have, I've been spared the knowledge of it. If I couldn't have faith in human nature, I wouldn't want to live. It is the one thing that could destroy for me the joy of living. I've come to believe that life, under almost any conditions, is worth while. I found that out when I had my accident some years ago, and was in the hospital. I thought, for a couple of weeks, that I would be blind for life. I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while. Just to be alive. I still think so."

- Harold Lloyd

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"I used old comic clothes stuff in the early days. I had the big shoes, I had the tight clothes, in fact I played several different characters. I played one called Willie Work; he used to have wide shoulders, a little cat mustache, a high hat. Another one was called Lonesome Luke, and his clothes were tight with a little funny hat; he had a funny little mustache. But when I adopted the glasses, it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being. He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them. They were natural and the romance could be believable."

- Harold Lloyd

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"My humor was never cruel or cynical. I just took life and poked fun at it. We made it so it could be understood the world over, without language barriers. We seem to have conquered the time barrier, too."

- Harold Lloyd

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"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

- J. J. Abrams

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"The experience I had seeing Star Wars for the first time was mind-blowing. Eleven is a great age to have your mind blown. I will never forget that feeling of seeing "Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" fade out. It was the first time a movie made me believe in another world that way."

- J. J. Abrams

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"It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group."

- J. J. Abrams

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"I’ve always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane. … The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge."

- J. J. Abrams

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"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. … That movie was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns did to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."

- J. J. Abrams

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"When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that."

- J. J. Abrams

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"We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again. Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you’re going to replace actors." You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they’ll have to wear a lycra leotard!"

- J. J. Abrams

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"Death isn't empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, fear of death.I say we break those chains.Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could you imagine it?"

- Pierce Brown

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"What do you live for?" I ask her suddenly. "Is it for me?Is it for family and love? Or is it for some dream?" "It's not just some dream, Darrow. I live for the dream that my children will be born free. That they will be what they like.That they will own land their father gave them." "I live for you," I say sadly. She kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

- Pierce Brown

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"I am alone with my sin. This is why they rule. The Peerless Scarred know that dark deeds are carried through life. They cannot be outrun. They must be worn if one is to rule. This is their first lesson. Or was it that the weak do not deserve life?"

- Pierce Brown

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"All my people sing of are memories. And so I will remember this death. It will burden me as it does not burden my fellow students - I must not let that change. I must not become like them. I'll remember that every sin, every death, every sacrifice, is for freedom."

- Pierce Brown

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"Humans are always negotiating. That's what conversation is. Someone has something, knows something. Someone wants something."

- Pierce Brown

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"You have everything, Karnus. Wealth. Power. Seven brothers and sisters. How many cousins? Nieces? Nephews? A father and mother who love you, yet...you are here, drinking alone, killing my friends. Setting the purpose of your life to ending me. Why?" "Because you wronged my family. No one wrongs the Bellona and lives." "So it's pride." "It's always pride." "Pride is just a shout into the wind." He shakes his head, voice deepening. "I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind - how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall." He leans forward. "So you see, pride is the only thing."

- Pierce Brown

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"Lies are rust on iron. A blemish on power."

- Pierce Brown

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"You are a worm who thought himself a serpent just because you slither. But your power was not real, Pliny. It was all a dream. Time now to wake."

- Pierce Brown

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"These Peerless thump their chests in salute to me. The monsters. They go with the wind, chasing power. But they don't realize power doesn't shift. Power is resolute. It is the mountain, not the wind. To shift so easily is to lose trust. And trust is what has kept me alive. Trust in my friends, and their trust in me."

- Pierce Brown

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"War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here, you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it."

- Pierce Brown

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"Tradition is the crown of the tyrant."

- Pierce Brown

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"Yes. I'm alone. I would have thought there to be worse fates than this, but now I know there are none. Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel."

- Pierce Brown

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"No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter. My boys, don't believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost always the problem. I'm a capitalist. And I believe in effort and progress and the ingenuity of our species. The continuing evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They've wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that."

- Pierce Brown

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"In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines."

- Pierce Brown

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"When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I'm tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before."

- Pierce Brown

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"How can I feel so melancholy for so terrible a past? Maybe it's just the nature of us, ever wishing for things that were and could be rather than things that are and will be."

- Pierce Brown

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"What kind of parent would want their children to have servants?" he asks, disgusted by the idea. "The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it's never been told no. "Look at the Institute you attended. Sexual slavery, murder, cannibalism of fellow Golds?" He shakes his head. "Barbaric. It's not what the Ancestors intended. But the Coreworlders are so desensitized to violence they've forgotten it's to have a purpose. Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like."

- Pierce Brown

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"It's hard for me to speak to you as if you were not a tyrant," I say. "You sit here and think you are more civilized than Luna because you obey your creed of honor, because you show restraint." I gesture to the simple house. "But you're not more civilized," I say. You're just more disciplined." "Isn't that civilization? Order? Denying animal impulses for stability?"

- Pierce Brown

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"What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read." Romulus thumps his chest. "Honor is what you do."

- Pierce Brown

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"I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her for the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she's looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I've forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that's only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living."

- Pierce Brown

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"If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose."

- Pierce Brown

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"They call him father, liberator, warlord, Reaper. But he feels a boy as he falls toward the pale blue planet, his armor red, his army vast, his heart heavy. It is the tenth year of war and the thirty-second of his life."

- Pierce Brown

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"A moving mind is always fed. At rest, mine eats itself."

- Pierce Brown

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"I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn't. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical."

- Pierce Brown

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"I do not feel brave. I am not the center of this symphony. No one even cares if I am here. Where is the immortal majesty the poets promised me? Where is the stern will my ancestors preached to their children? It was just an illusion conjured by fools who never left their libraries, or by agents of necessity. This is the Noble Lie."

- Pierce Brown

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"Is a man a coward if he realizes that bravery is just a myth the old tell the young so they line up for the meatgrinder?"

- Pierce Brown

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"Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart."

- Pierce Brown

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"From a distance, death seems the end of a story. But when you are near, when you can smell the burning skin, see the entrails, you see death for what it is. A traumatic cauterization of a life thread. No purpose. No conclusion. Just snip. I knew war was dreadful, but I did not expect to fear it. How can anyone not, when death is just a blind giant with scissors?"

- Pierce Brown

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"Nothing beautiful survives the mob."

- Pierce Brown

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"Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains."

- Pierce Brown

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"To see them from above: the roving herds of beasts, the rivers carving stone, the rituals of man in all their varied panoply, to see the clouds roil over the patchwork latifundia of Asian plains, to see the mines of our home, is to remember the patterns of the world, and the majesty and complication and impermeable obscurity of distant lands. It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself. That is what my father told me. It was his warning about power, though he sought it to his end. I've never understood how a man so wise could be so undone by himself. Perhaps I never will, and that is what has always frightened me. Not that I cannot control my own fate - that is impossible - but that I cannot control myself."

- Pierce Brown

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"What devious designs freedom requires. One must worry about the strength of a principle when it must compromise itself so often to survive."

- Pierce Brown

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"Don't you find it peculiar? The human conviction that we are the heirs of history instead of paragraphs that are almost over. A survival mechanism, no doubt."

- Pierce Brown

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"The tragedy of the gifted is the belief they are entitled to greatness, Lysander. As a human, you are entitled only to death."

- Pierce Brown

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"You know I believe we all begin equal parts light and dark. I fear you think your strength lies in your darkness. But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends."

- Pierce Brown

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"He has little appetite for banter. He knows the dangers of the path I have chosen to walk, and he doubts me because the old do not remember the necessities of youth. They see only the years on our horizon to which they think we are entitled. But we are entitled only to the moment, and owe nothing to the future except that we follow our convictions."

- Pierce Brown

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""You know the curse of this world?" I ask, looking at the body the Carver made for me. "The greatest gifts were given to the worst of us." "Not realizing they are gifts is what makes them the worst," he replies."

- Pierce Brown

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"I kept looking for hope in the world. Expecting the world to supply deliverance if I p[lucked the right chords. Demanding that it supply validation to my labor if I just gave enough effort. But that is not the nature of the world. Its nature is to consume. In time, it will consume us all, and the spheres will spin until they too are consumed when our sun dies. Maybe that is the point of it. Knowing that ine day darkness will cover all, at least your eyes were open to moments of light."

- Pierce Brown

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"The legends of our age die one by one, like autumn leaves; and when they are gone, will we be lesser for their absence? It seems cheap. With his death imminent, the worlds feel emptier. Almost as cavernous as they did when Cassius fell. One by one, the titans of my youth disappear, and freed from their shadow, I do not feel liberated. I feel bereft. Nothing is permanent. No one escapes. "The bill comes at the end," I whisper."

- Pierce Brown

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"I think, as with all things, honor is best appreciated in moderation. As is cruelty."

- Pierce Brown

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"The champions causes such as gay rights (including gay marriage), equality for women (suffrage, the right to work, etc.), and religious freedom (usually in the form of freedom from religion). Yet, fundamentalist Islam opposes nearly everything the American Left stands for. In many Islamic countries, homosexuality is punishable by death. In Iran, a top government official recently said that torture followed by death is the appropriate punishment for being gay. In Saudi Arabia, women can’t vote, run for public office, or drive cars. Women are routinely jailed and beaten for merely being in the presence of a man not related to them. The Saudi version of Dr. Phil provides televised lessons to men on how to properly beat their wives. In many Islamic countries, women are forced into s and held as property by their husbands, something not exactly in line with progressive Western thinking. In some Muslim countries, women aren’t even allowed to decide what clothes to wear. To reveal even the smallest patch of skin is a crime. Religious freedom is often nonexistent under Islamic rule. In countries like Afghanistan and Iran, people who convert from Islam to another religion face public execution. So why does the American Left hate Christianity yet love Islam?"

- Chuck Hustmyre

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"In unambiguous terms, fundamentalist Islam has announced again and again that it despises the values, culture, and traditions of America. The American Left does too. Consistent with the Arabic proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the American Left has formed an alliance with fundamentalist Islam to transform this country into something far removed from its Judeo-Christian origins and ideals. The mistake the Left is making is that its so-called progressive goals have nothing in common with the medieval tenants of fundamentalist Islam. Militant Muslims have no respect for American progressives, any more than they respect the very existence of Israel. Fundamentalist Islam is using the American Left to advance its own agenda."

- Chuck Hustmyre

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"Militant Muslims want Islam and sharia law to dominate the West. Their goal is to subvert the U.S. Constitution and our way of life to the will of Allah. The word Islam means submission. What members of the American Left seem blind to is the fact that in countries where Islam dominates, their progressive ideas would be crushed and many of them would be thrown in jail simply because of their lifestyle choices. Yet, the American Left continues to serve as apologist-in-chief for fundamentalist Islam. Why? Because deep down American Leftists are terrified of Islamic fundamentali"

- Chuck Hustmyre

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"The American Left’s affair with fundamentalist Islam is essentially a love-fear relationship. The Left loves Islam’s hatred of America and its desire to radically change this country, but the Left also fears what militant Muslims are capable of, especially if they turn their murderous rage on their so-called friends. So the Left, like Neville Chamberlain with the Nazis, walks a tightrope, appeasing Muslims at every turn, offering excuses for Islamic violence, and hoping Muslim fundamentalists won’t bite the hand that feeds them their excuses."

- Chuck Hustmyre

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"I'm the last person he called that night. I wonder, how many girls didn't answer before he got to fat freshman me? Am I in his phone as Schumer? Probably. But I was here, and I wanted to be held and touched and felt desired, despite everything. I wanted to be with him. I imagined us on campus together, holding hands, proving, "Look! I am lovable! And this cool older guy likes me!" I can't be the troll doll I'm afraid I've become."

- Amy Schumer

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"I'm probably like 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want. Like, that's the truth. It's not a problem. It's not a problem."

- Amy Schumer

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"The cult surprised me. I didn't even realise it had been successful. I loved it, I had fun working on it and it was one of the first things I'd ever written. And it wasn't just that it wasn't a hit - it was a huge failure. No one saw it. I don't know how on earth it caught on years later."

- Shane Black

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"It would be interesting to have two movies - one The Monster Squad, and one The Monster Squad and they're 30 years apart and so are the kids; the characters have aged. As long as people understood that's what we're doing, I think that could be fun. That's a good idea"

- Shane Black

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"The original story that I sold [Morgan Creek] (and that I shot) ended with Kinderman blowing away Patient X. There was no exorcism. But it was a Mexican stand-off between me and the studio. I was entitled to one preview, then they could go and do what they wanted with the picture. They gave me a preview but it was the lowest end preview audience I have ever seen in my life. They dragged in zombies from Haiti to watch this film. It was unbelievable. But I decided, better I should do it than anyone else. I foolishly thought: I can do a good exorcism, I'll turn this pig's ear into a silk purse. So I did it"

- William Peter Blatty

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"Being a Catholic, I believe that we all have a foot in two worlds. The one that we’re conscious of is in time, but now and then a freak like me gets a flash from the other foot, and that one, I think, is in eternity, where time does not exist and so the future and the past are both the present. So now and again when I’m feeling a tingling in that other foot, I believe that I’m seeing the future."

- William Peter Blatty

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"We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops — which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair."

- William Peter Blatty

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"I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us … the observers … every person in this house. And I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity … to see ourselves as ultimately bestial … without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it perhaps … For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us. He knows … the demon knows where to strike … Long ago I despaired of ever loving my neighbor. Certain people … repelled me. How could I love them? I thought. It tormented me … How many husbands and wives must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds? Ah, dear God! There it lies, I think, Damien … possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very seldom in extraordinary interventions … such as here … this girl … this poor child. No, I see it most often in the little things Damien: in the senseless petty spites; the misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Enough of these."

- William Peter Blatty

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"And yet even from this — from evil — there will finally come good in some way; in some way that we may never understand or even see. … Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness … And perhaps even Satan — Satan, in spite of himself — somehow serves to work out the will of God."

- William Peter Blatty

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"The goal was just to finish the movie and get it out in a few theaters. To think that decades later people would still be thinking and talking about it, I could have never imagined."

- Don Coscarelli

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"I didn't at first because horror movies scared me too much, but I really do love the genre and it’'s a playground where you can really be artistic and create ideas in the minds of the audience and portray the unreal. It'’s very cool experimentation ground for a filmmaker."

- Sam Raimi

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"Frankenstein, he makes a friend, he wants a wife... That’s the one that I think cemented the creature as an icon, because all of the sudden you got to know the creature as a full-fledged person, and you felt sympathy for it, and not just, “Oh, it’s a monster.”"

- Michael Dougherty

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"Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions."

- Steve Bannon

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"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

- Steve Bannon

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"There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England...We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war."

- Steve Bannon

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"We should just go buck wild...Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty."

- Steve Bannon

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"We don’t like to try to guess what’s going to happen in the future, but I’ve got to tell you, I think people were very engaged in this election, and I think will be very engaged as time goes forward. The key is to hold people accountable. The hobbits, or the deplorables, had a great run in ’16. Everybody mocked them and ridiculed them, and now they’ve spoken. I think ’17 is going to be a very exciting year,"

- Steve Bannon

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"The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while...I want you to quote this, the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States... The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. [The 2016 election was] a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there...You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party."

- Steve Bannon

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"[Re Spicer loss of credibility] Are you kidding me? We think that's a badge of honor. 'Questioning his integrity' are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work."

- Steve Bannon

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"We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation. We hire people who are freaks. They don’t have social lives. They’re junkies about news and information."

- Steve Bannon

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"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society."

- Steve Bannon

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"And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years. ... Now that call converges with something we have to face, and it’s a very unpleasant topic, but we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it."

- Steve Bannon

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"Until we have the black working class and the Hispanic working class getting high-value-added jobs, we've failed as a society. To me: citizens first. And we don't need a million immigrants in this country. Particularly, we don't need a million immigrants that don't come with a real set of skills."

- Steve Bannon

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"If Bernie Sanders had an ounce of [[Michael Avenatti|[Michael] Avenatti’s]] fearlessness, he would’ve been the Democratic nominee, and we would have had a much tougher time beating him. Now, I don’t believe a professional politician is going to be there at the end of the day. I’ve always said it’s going to be someone like Oprah, or Avenatti, or somebody that’s more media-savvy that’s going to be there."

- Steve Bannon

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"The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

- Steve Bannon

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"[He's a] whiner...I don’t think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all...Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic."

- Steve Bannon

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"I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."

- Steve Bannon

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"We're going to federal court to look for radical transparency... What the Democrats are doing are generating &mdash; you got the printing press going &mdash; they're generating ballots everywhere. You got ballots coming out of &mdash; you got new votes in Georgia, got new votes in Pennsylvania..."

- Steve Bannon

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"Everybody take a deep breath. Not only do we got this, we already own this. Okay: He's President of the United States; He won a resounding victory on votes that matter. Right? You have Black Lives Matter, you have All Lives Matter &mdash; we have Votes That Matter. Votes that matter are: certifiable, verifiable, legal votes that were voted on the third of November, the year of our Lord 2020."

- Steve Bannon

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"There is no day of infamy yesterday. Everybody take a deep breath, say a prayer, commit yourself, trust the process... Because we've won, not "We're going to win, ..." The President has won... We're not going to play these games, 50,000 ballots here, no postmark... Burke's dictum: We owe as much to those who came before us.. Everybody says it's all for the kids, for the grandkids, yes... But Burke told us... we have a moral obligation to take that, and make it better and pass it on... and doing that, you respect your obligations to those that came before you... Jack Maxey: the men at Normandy, tell us about them... Twenty years of age.. Everybody that voted on the third: Pres. Trump took an oath to God.. You have a moral obligation, direct connection, to those kids that died at Normandy, that couldn't even vote. Did they whine? Did they cry? And they knew they were going to certain death... You're going into that.. The only way we're going to get through is to push ourselves through... Stop with your friends, "I'm so worried. I'm so nervous " STOP IT. We've got this. The only way they can take it is if we give it to them... If you allow that to happen... I want you to explain it to the twenty year old kid in the first wave on D-Day..."

- Steve Bannon

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"Here in the Judeo-Christian West we believe in eternal life. In Philadelphia they'll say they believe in eternal voting."

- Steve Bannon

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"The dead will rise again &mdash; at least in Pennsylvania, to vote."

- Steve Bannon

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"Pennsylvania, if you don't win this now, not only will you never win again &mdash; you don't deserve to win again."

- Steve Bannon

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"The Hard Drive From Hell: you come for the porn, but you stay for the compromise."

- Steve Bannon

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"Mike Lindell: "'The Big Lie' is the big lie." Steve: [Laughter] Is that like a Zen koan? Like "the sound of one hand clapping in the forest"?!"

- Steve Bannon

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"If Andrew [Breitbart] were still around, I bet he'd tell Bannon to stay in Europe — and not just because his tendency to wear several shirts seems more consistent with European fashion. Bannon's understanding of conservatism is entirely European... Conservatism in America has always been deeply traditionalist, sometimes too much so. But at the core of the modern conservative movement has been the effort to protect, defend and conserve the traditions of a liberal revolution, grounded in the best arguments of the enlightenment (slavery notwithstanding). Bannon's potted blood and soil nationalism and racially tinged populism runs counter to that project and the best and highest ideals of conservatism and America itself. He turned Andrew's Breitbart.com into a "platform" (his word) for the alt-right seeking to inject European swill into the American body politic. Let him stay in Europe and hand out torches for the marchers. His un-American schtick has no place here. I'm sure Andrew would agree."

- Steve Bannon

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"Donald J. Trump today announced that Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon has been appointed CEO, temporarily stepping down from his role with Breitbart News to work full-time on Mr. Trump’s campaign in a new position designed to bolster the business-like approach of Mr. Trump’s campaign."

- Steve Bannon

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""I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years. They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win," said Mr. Trump."

- Steve Bannon

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"Mr. Bannon, once recognized by Bloomberg Politics as the “most dangerous political operative in America,” will oversee the campaign staff and operations in addition to strategic oversight of major campaign initiatives in addition to working with Mr. Manafort."

- Steve Bannon

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"Trump (and Bannon and other right-wing authoritarian leaders around the world) is often referred to as a "populist" because he displays faux concern for the working class and a resentment of science and education, but his policies are in fact grotesquely elitist. If by "populist" we mean whipping up resentment against immigrants and people of color, then we should say that. Otherwise, "populism" is just a lazy euphemism for racism."

- Steve Bannon

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"I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton - it was great! Thanks S"

- Steve Bannon

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"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

- Steve Bannon

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"Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination."

- Steve Bannon

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"Steve had very little to do with our historic victory."

- Steve Bannon

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"Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue."

- Steve Bannon

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"No sane person would hire Steven Bannon for a job that included making the trains run on time."

- Steve Bannon

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"Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House. It was a flaky career that got him here. Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in the Navy, a lieutenant on a ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master's degree at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs- his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles- but not rising above a midlevel position. In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entrepreneurhood under the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something of a hustler's shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry of a small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film projects- none a hit. Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed. For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed."

- Steve Bannon

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"Chinese media is taking aim at Steve Bannon, with one broadcaster calling the former White House adviser a “shameless anti-Chinese pioneer” over the weekend."

- Steve Bannon

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"Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, has used tough rhetoric on China’s ruling Communist Party since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the regime of “premeditated murder” and estimating the country owes the world “north of $5 trillion” for economic devastation wrought by the virus."

- Steve Bannon

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"Something true most people won’t say: Steve Bannon sacrificed his whole life for his country. His life will never be the same again. He was called a white supremacist and neo-Nazi by the press because they recognized what a formidable adversary he was."

- Steve Bannon

• 0 likes• Businesspeople from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Publishers from the United States•
"If you look at our country's history, change doesn't come from presidents. Change comes from large groups of angry people."

- Aziz Ansari

• 0 likes• Actors from South Carolina• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Television personalities• Feminists•
"One of the first things I did when I came on, I said, “I do not want this Kong to be a quadruped. I want him to stand upright, I want a throwback to the 1933 film where he is a biped, because he is a monster. He’s not just a big silverback gorilla, he’s a movie monster.” So I wanted to stand him upright, I wanted to make him tall, and part of that is because I wanted him to feel like this fusion between a god, a man, and a beast. I wanted to make him big enough that, if any of us stood at this table and we looked up at this thing, towered over us, how big does that thing have to be for the first thing that your brain says is, “That’s a god. I’m looking at a god.”"

- Jordan Vogt-Roberts

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Detroit•
"Kong, I think represents a classic cinematic case of being misunderstood. And so, tapping into that is a very, very pure way of breaking down his character and then getting into him being this lonely protector, and the sad plight that he has is a totally different thing than we’ve seen before. Was it difficult? Sure, but it was necessary."

- Jordan Vogt-Roberts

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Detroit•
"You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

- Merian C. Cooper

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Aviators from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Jacksonville• Academy Award winners•
"I just heard what was said, it isn't strictly accurate by any means, I'm a man who's just been lucky on having wonderful partners, Schoedsack alot more than I did on Grass and Chang, and right down the line I've only had John Ford as a partner, Thomas is a great friend on technicolor, and for cinerama, Fred Waller invented it, Thomas picked up the ball and ran with it, and there's a young man in this audience, Bob Bendick, that most of you have never heard, that did far more of the production then I did. I want to thank all the great partners I've had in my life, thank you. I just want to add I'm still John Ford's partner."

- Merian C. Cooper

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Aviators from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Jacksonville• Academy Award winners•
"I liked Merian Cooper well enough. He had this wonderful, boyish enthusiasm, and I was keen about his style and his friendship and what he stood for as a human being. I was ready to take whatever Merian Cooper wanted me to do. He was like a big boy who had enthusiasms."

- Merian C. Cooper

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Aviators from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Jacksonville• Academy Award winners•
"The first Elm Street was such a fresh idea and it absolutely blew me away. But the second one didn’t have Wes involved and I think it suffered as a result of that. With the third one Wes and his writing partner Bruce Wagner already had a script before I came onboard. Then me and Frank Darabont did some re-writes. We thought ‘why can’t we make this film wilder and much more fun that the first one’. I realised that the heart of it was these adolescent kids. These 15/16 year old kids who are just at that age when you start to realise that bad things happen in the world. Of course, none of the adults believe the kids about Freddy so going to them always makes things worse in these films."

- Chuck Russell

• 0 likes• Actors from Illinois• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Stephen Sommers certainly knew what he was doing. Indiana Jones is a hardened cynical guy with a heart of mush and Stephen created an Indiana Jones-lite, one who was a jocular guy willing to take a pie to the face, handle a gun, work in a fist fight, and handle all the requirements of an action hero. Brendan has the unique ability to take a pie to the face, let himself be in a situation where he feels overwhelmed, and then survive. This was definitely in the wheel house of Indiana Jones and always has been. It was quite conscious on Stephen’s part and now I’ve done something different with it."

- Rob Cohen

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States• People from New York (state)•
"You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare."

- Rob Cohen

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States• People from New York (state)•
"I staggered through my career and came out the other end, alive. I made some films that meant something to me. In my opinion, they weren’t all great, and they weren’t all successful, but they sure were ‘me’. And this is what I was going through or thinking or feeling as a director at the time, and I’m very proud of them. A lot of great directors just never had the chance to have their work appreciated and celebrated and watched, all these years after they were made. So, man, what do you want out of life? It’s great!"

- John Carpenter

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Film editors• Composers from the United States•
"There were two times in my life that inspired me the most. The first was when I was a kid, probably the most emotionally influential time, when you’re naïve and innocent. I went to movie theaters and fell in love with genre films in the 1950s, when there was a big wave of monster movies. My passion came from the young guy who was watching The Fly back in 1958. Then, going to USC I began to watch movies in a different way and was exposed to different kinds of movies, foreign films. We had directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford come down and lecture us. It was unbelievable!"

- John Carpenter

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"When I think of John Carpenter, I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted. How can we? Why should we? He is lightning in a bottle"

- John Carpenter

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Film editors• Composers from the United States•
"I get fan mail almost every day, and lots of calls from people who say, "We’re having a party. Could you bring your rubber suit over and jump in the pool and scare everybody?.""

- Ricou Browning

• 0 likes• Actors from Florida• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I'll put it this way, it's like when you play football and you put on all the gear — the shoes and the pads and the helmet. At first, it's bulky and cumbersome. But then, when you go in the game and you start to play, you don't even know you have it on. Swimming in the suit was like that. Once you get into it, you forget about the suit."

- Ricou Browning

• 0 likes• Actors from Florida• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think why people will love these monster films is the they are an homage to the originals, which means you’re gonna get complex characters. And the thing that I think is interesting about monsters is that they are always exaggerations of human attributes or human fears. For example, Frankenstein was a result of the kind of industrial and scientific revolution—are we playing God? Should we be playing God? And with the Wolfman there’s that worry of what happens if I lose control? What happens if I hurt the things around me that I love? There’s very human questions and worries and fears and darkness and cravings."

- Chris Morgan (writer)

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from Chicago•
"I wanted to do a show about a character that was an innocent, and so I focused on a sea sponge because it's a funny animal, a strange one, I thought he was a funny, nerdy, squeaky-clean square."

- Stephen Hillenburg

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Actors from Oklahoma• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"It finally dawned on me that if I was going to do my own show, all those things I lectured about and obsessed about would make for an interesting world."

- Stephen Hillenburg

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Actors from Oklahoma• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think we all thought the show would be good, but I didn't ever assume it would catch on in a mass audience sort of way, that's unexpected, and we're flattered and relieved. Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don't come out of pop cultural references, he added. It seems like we're aiming at a child audience, but everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It's playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful. You can kind of let go."

- Stephen Hillenburg

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Actors from Oklahoma• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"People have to come together and realize how important our oceans are. One thing I’m hoping will come out of the documentary is the realization that the show came from something that’s precious, and that we need to appreciate it. … Hopefully, if you watch ‘SpongeBob,’ you see the plankton and the crabs and starfish, and you’ll want to take care of our oceans."

- Stephen Hillenburg

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Actors from Oklahoma• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible."

- George A. Romero

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New York City•
"I don't like the new trends in horror. All this torture stuff seems really mean-spirited. People have forgotten how to laugh, and I don't see anybody who's using it as allegory. The guy I love right now is Guillermo del Toro. I'd love to make a film like Pan's Labyrinth."

- George A. Romero

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New York City•
"I wanted to be an actor or be a director since I was a very small child. I mean, my mother went into labor at a movie theater. There were, like, four movie theaters around us when I was growing up in Austin. Movies became my babysitter. I think I saw more films than I saw reality. Then I noticed something when I was in my late teens that really made my thinking shift in what I wanted to do with film. When I was watching a film as a young man, there would be a second or two when I drifted outside of myself. I noticed how for a moment, in the image and music and train of information, I was traveling through the film, leaving myself. And I knew that was something I wanted to do. I wanted to see how long I could make that feeling go on—if I could take someone outside themselves, outside their body for a minute, five minutes, maybe even 80 minutes, 90 minutes."

- Tobe Hooper

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Austin•
"I'm not sure what this means and if it can be replicated, but we did something very unique and none of it was planned. There wasn't a $20 million marketing budget designed to make this; it just happened. The audience took the movie for its own and decided to make it an event, and that's pretty awesome. And by the way, there were people who liked the movie so much they were defending the film against people who were thrashing it. Completely mind-blowing. I've never had that happen, either."

- Anthony C. Ferrante

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from California•
"We do these movies in six months so there’s going to be some stuff that misses the bar in terms of looking super polished. We take what we’re doing seriously as if we’re doing one of those things. Also, we just go, “Look, we’re just going to be outlandish and crazy because that’s what these movies are.” They’re intended to be fun. However anybody wants to construe them is up to them. If they want to think that they’re bad and campy, that’s fine. What I’ve found in general though is the true fans that love these movies, they love them because they are what they are."

- Anthony C. Ferrante

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from California•
"Book-to-screen adaptations must always strive for two things: First, you must find a way to tell the broad story of the original plot; second, you must somehow reflect the spirit and texture of the novel—that is, you must transform a lot of words into a few pictures. All those digressions, inner monologues, thought processes, turns of phrase, all those word pictures, and especially all that un-photographable stuff that made the novel so delicious, must somehow be represented onscreen by use of the filmmaker's tools: moving pictures, dialogue and performance, sets, costumes, music and all the other tricks of the trade. That's the process a writer must go through to create a successful blueprint for a film."

- Tommy Lee Wallace

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Editors from the United States• Designers•
"As a director, you must keep your sense of humor, your patience and, most of all, your ability to funnel the collective energies of a large group of creative people. For that, you must stay well-hydrated, well-fed, and well-rested. It's also crucial that you have a top-notch ensemble."

- Tommy Lee Wallace

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Editors from the United States• Designers•
"I think it’s important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that’s a problem. You’ve got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you’re going to make full use of it. There are some people who shouldn’t watch horror films, and I’m all right with that. It’s not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil. We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it."

- Scott Derrickson

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• People from Denver•
"If you’re doing it right, you’re not asking the audience to buy into your point of view at all. If you’re doing it right, you’re asking the audience to accept the character’s point of view as the character’s point of view. That can be anything. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies from characters’ points of view that are not our own. That’s part of the gift movies give us."

- Scott Derrickson

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• People from Denver•
"Primarily we write the show to entertain ourselves. Sometimes I recognize a joke that reminds me of something that I would've busted up at as a kid. I'm happy when I see those kinds of jokes. Because the show is for kids more than anyone else, but most of the time we are just trying to crack ourselves up and trying not to worry about much other than that."

- Pendleton Ward

• 0 likes• Animators• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• People from San Antonio• Primetime Emmy Award winners•
"If you're an aspiring show maker, and you have the means to sit around for a few months, you should be making funny cartoons and uploading them to the internet. I feel like I've discovered this secret about the entertainment industry it's that they're desperate. They're super, super desperate for new talent and constantly developing and canceling things all the time. It's the nature of the business, so if you're one of those people who can make a cartoon so funny that it gets a ton of hits on the internet then the industry is going to be all over your business."

- Pendleton Ward

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"Dark comedies are my favorite, because I love that feeling – being happy and scared at the same time. It's my favorite way to feel – when I'm on the edge of my seat but I'm happy, that sense of conflicting emotions. And there's a lot of that in the show, I think."

- Pendleton Ward

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"Any new property is always risky. And my show really didn’t have a strong hook to it. I couldn’t come up with a tag line for it. I just liked that it was friendly and nice, just two friends that hang out in a weird world. I think that’s what was risky. It was boring and you couldn’t see where it would go. I mean, I could. But I don’t think anyone else could see where it could go, in the beginning."

- Pendleton Ward

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"I really love seeing things go sour, because that’s the way dread creeps into life. A lot of horror films start with a great shock scene. I grew up on that model and it’s great fun, but very perversely, I’m interested in setting up something else, where you’re really engaged with the humanity of the characters — you could be in a normal drama with its own set of problems — and then something else develops. I like this philosophical question: what comes first, reality or your interpretation of it? However interesting that is, and whether it fits in with the horror genre, I don’t know, but I think it makes perfect sense."

- Larry Fessenden

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"I consider myself very sentimental, very sensitive, but obviously my outward appearance is a bit scruffy-haired, and I have a general tendency toward snarling at people, and a sort of misanthropic nature. Maybe that is what people actually read. I do actually believe that misanthropy and sensitivity go hand in hand, because I have a tremendous disappointment in the ways of the world."

- Larry Fessenden

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"I love filmmaking when fate is a part of the process and you are dependent on the laws of physics and the elements to get a single moment that transports or in some way creates an illusion even for a moment. I think that is tremendous fun and what I think filmmaking is, catching lightning in a bottle. I feel like we are so used to CGI now and thank god because it is a wonderful tool, but there is an element of everything you are looking at has been created in the comfort of a studio. I want to return to a world where I can celebrate when you are really interacting with the world."

- Larry Fessenden

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"The more I examined my emotions, the more I was able to put that in my writing. I wanted to concentrate more on human emotions and internal feelings in the characters, inasmuch as I could in an animated cartoon show—ostensibly one for a young audience. There were times when I felt I couldn’t put the depth of feeling that I wanted to in the cartoons at that time, because it’s for kids and you have to keep it kind of upbeat. But I did it where I could. And I put it in my other work as well, when I was writing things like comics and screenplays."

- Paul Dini

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"We came up with the idea of people who are attracted to criminals, especially those who might write to a criminal in jail saying, “I understand you, I sympathize with what you’re going through,” and they just sort of pin all their hopes and dreams on somebody who they think is misunderstood but who is in fact rather dangerous. The fact that Harley might have gone from this intelligent, cool therapist to this crazed clown woman was both very interesting and very tragic to us. We thought that had the makings of a great Batman villain — like Batman himself, his villains start off human but then some tragedy happens and warps them into what they are today."

- Paul Dini

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"I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries."

- Frank Capra

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"Shortly after the United States entered World War Two, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall summoned Frank Capra, the Hollywood director, and asked him to prepare a series of orientation films for viewing by American troops. When Capra demurred on the grounds that he had never made a documentary before, Marshall retorted: "Capra, I have never been Chief of Staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today, who a year ago had never seen the ocean before." The director apologized, and promised "The best damned documentary films ever made.""

- Frank Capra

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"The films subsequently produced for the Army by Capra and his team survive as classics of wartime cinematic propaganda- a remarkable accomplishment, in retrospect, since each script had to be approved by some fifty military and civilian agencies in Washington. One of the primary objectives of the series was to combat the isolationist sentiments that lingered in the United States, and with this in mind the seven core films that Capra directed were given the collective title Why We Fight. President Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed by the first of these documentaries that he urged it to be shown in public theaters as well as to recruits. This was done, and Prelude to War went on to win an Academy Award as the best documentary of 1942. During the course of World War Two, the Why We Fight films were required viewing for millions of American soldiers. The series was also distributed abroad, with soundtracks in French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese."

- Frank Capra

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"To be inspired with the will to win, Capra told his associates as they embarked on this work, Americans needed to be shown that they were fighting for the existence of their country, and at the same time were carrying the "torch of freedom" for a better postwar world- a world in which conquest, exploitation, and economic evils had been eliminated, and peace and democracy prevailed. This seemed a clear line, and a familiar one to anyone who recalled the idealistic Allied propaganda of World War One."

- Frank Capra

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"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

- Frank Capra

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"God forbid you got seasick because there was no option to go back. So that really did force us to be a group."

- John C. Reilly

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"I try to take things that challenge me either physically or mentally, or I have to learn a new skill."

- John C. Reilly

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"Oh, absolutely, it felt more serious than your typical job. One of the things that got us through how difficult the shooting actually was was that we are telling a real story."

- John C. Reilly

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"One of the unique things is that whether we were out at sea or in the middle of the water tank, a lot of times you just couldn't leave. Especially when we were out at sea."

- John C. Reilly

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"There's something about the water - that solitary kind of peaceful feeling. You're on Earth, but not quite."

- John C. Reilly

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"This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it."

- John C. Reilly

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Singers from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"You were there all day long, 12 hours a day. So there was none of this, "I'm going back to my trailer, my trailer's bigger than your trailer," that kind of Hollywood nonsense."

- John C. Reilly

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"Sweet berry wine!"

- John C. Reilly

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Singers from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
""(infuriated)" I'M GONNA WRECK IT!"

- John C. Reilly

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Singers from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Having been a "Star Wars" fan my whole life, and having spent most of my life on the other side of the curb and in that fandom, it softens the blow a little bit. I'm aware through my own experience that, first of all, the fans are so passionate, they care so deeply — sometimes they care very violently at me on Twitter. But it's because they care about these things, and it hurts when you're expecting something specific and you don't get it from something that you love. It always hurts, so I don't take it personally if a fan reacts negatively and lashes out on me on Twitter. That's fine. It's my job to be there for that."

- Rian Johnson

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"Rick and Morty is definitely the most freeing, most fun thing I’ve ever worked on. It’s had the biggest impact. I love everything I make—and hate it, I guess—but I have a very special relationship with Rick and Morty, and getting a 70-episode pickup means that I can actually really focus on it, and loving it won’t be taking away from anything else. I can let Rick and Morty take away from everything."

- Dan Harmon

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"If you like Dexter, you'll love Daryl, my new show about a baby rapist - with a HEART OF GOLD?! HUH?! Like Showtime, but freeeeeee!"

- Dan Harmon

• 0 likes• Actors from Wisconsin• Producers from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Rappers from the United States•
"Anna and Elsa's parents didn't die. Yes, there was a shipwreck, but they were at sea a little bit longer than we think they were because the mother was pregnant, and she gave birth on the boat, to a little boy. They get shipwrecked, and somehow they really washed way far away from the Scandinavian waters, and they end up in the jungle. They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas."

- Chris Buck

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"A wedding. According to Chris, they didn't die on the boat. They got washed up on a shore in a jungle island. The queen gave birth to a baby boy. They build a treehouse. They get eaten by a leopard..."

- Chris Buck

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"A wedding. According to Chris, they didn't die on the boat. They got washed up on a shore in a jungle island. The queen gave birth to a baby boy. They build a treehouse. They get eaten by a leopard..."

- Jennifer Lee (filmmaker)

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"10 February 2014 in response to "Where were the King and Queen planning to go when they lost their lives out at sea?" speaking of Chris Buck"

- Jennifer Lee (filmmaker)

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"Because Launchpad appeared in 'DuckTales' and we used Roboduck as the Superman character, the hero who gets all the glory as opposed to Darkwing, fans try to connect the two realities, They are two different universes in my book. We work in the alternate Duckiverse."

- Tad Stones

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"Those Americans who went to Spain to fight Franco and stave off World War II have never minded being called "premature anti-fascists." They were proud of the label."

- Alvah Bessie

• 0 likes• Novelists from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States• Members of the Communist Party USA• Anti-fascists•
"We have long memories. We have developed a relative immunity to the endless barrage of propaganda, slander and outright lies that has been laid upon us. And especially, we are immune to the Big Lie that destroyed Spain and which Hitler developed to such a point of perfection that it was necessary for millions of human beings to die to achieve the defeat of the Axis. Yet the Big Lie survives and flourishes mightily in our own country today. As it is promulgated daily, hourly and every minute of the day through every medium of communication, so it must be answered- until our own people see it for what it is and explode it in their own good time."

- Alvah Bessie

• 0 likes• Novelists from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States• Jews from the United States• Members of the Communist Party USA• Anti-fascists•
"Whenever we hear it said that Communism threatens us from within and without; whenever we are told that the Soviet Union menaces our "way of life" and wants to conquer the world; whenever we are summoned to a Holy Crusade that- if it is allowed to begin- will ravish the entire earth, we recall the following simple facts of history: Mussolini killed whatever democracy existed in Italy by claiming that Italy was threatened by Communism; Hitler destroyed the German Republic with the same weapon; Tojo broke the resistance of the people of Japan by using the identical thesis; Franco murdered the Spanish Republic in the name of the "Red menace"; The Axis launched World War II under the slogan of saving the world from Communism."

- Alvah Bessie

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"The free meal was bad, and 'Lopez' wasted a lot of time sending a cablegram signed 'Hy' to some one in America. But we got to the Committee at two, and sat on low benches in a lecture hall. There were other men there; one I recall who was wearing a blue beret and a leather glove on an obviously artificial hand. "You guys just get back?" he said, and we said, "No, we're just going." "Oh," he mumbled, "more suckers." We looked at him but he retired into himself, sitting in the back of the room for a time, and then suddenly leaving."

- Alvah Bessie

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"I was four years in the war," Merkel said. "German army." "What was it like?" "It ain't bad," he said. "It ain't bad at all; you get used to it. You never see the enemy; you shoot and shoot and you never see 'em. It ain't bad at all." We talked of the World War and the Spanish War. Merkel told us that he had done underground work in Germany, and of the discontent among the German workers. "Every ship what comes to Hamburg," he said, "brings literature for 'em; they eat it up. I fight against Hitler, that bastard," he said. We talked of conditions back home; of Roosevelt's popularity and liberalism, and of the reactionary opposition they were trying to whip up again; of its chances of success. "In the end," Merkel said, "you can't fool the workers. Takes 'em maybe a long time to wake up with the newspapers saying lies all the time, but you can't fool 'em."

- Alvah Bessie

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"We switched out the light and tried to sleep again; the windows were clouded with steam as the train shrieked along the tracks, and we thought of the thousands from all countries who had traveled this way before, and of those who had not come back. We thought of the volunteer organizations throughout the world that were helping to get these men to Spain; we thought of the men from Fascist countries, who had known the enemy at first hand, had escaped from their own countries and traveled thousands of miles to get to Spain to fight the enemy on another front, and who would have no homes if they survived the war. We were optimistic of the outcome."

- Alvah Bessie

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"Here were students, dock-workers, clerks and labor-organizers, farmers. Most were unacquainted with each other, but they came together now with the warmth and familiarity of old friends; they told each other of their work in their respective countries; of their friends and families. They spoke of the European political scene, of the imperative necessity for the Loyalist Government to drive the foreign invader from Spain; you felt that with each of them, no matter how diverse his previous training, the Spanish struggle was a personal issue, something deep and close. This in itself, considering the disparity of their origin, was a major political phenomenon. They spoke no word of the actual business of war; they did not speculate on the nature of artillery or air attacks, of machine-gun fire. You felt: many of these men will never see their friends or families again; they don't know what they're getting into; their idealism has blinded them to the reality of what they will have to face. And you knew immediately that you were wrong; that they were so far from being blind that it might be said of them that they were among the first soldiers in the history of the world who really knew what they were about, what they were going to fight for- and that they were ready and eager to fight. Their very presence on the French frontier was an earnest of their understanding and their clarity; no one had made them come, no force but an inner force had brought them."

- Alvah Bessie

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"Whenever the mind has led the body to an important decision, events have a way of assuming, momentarily, a half-symbolic nature. The mind plays that trick on you, and everything you see seems to partake of the quality of the decision you have made."

- Alvah Bessie

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"You cannot really believe in the existence of a foreign country until you see it."

- Alvah Bessie

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"And towering above each town, generally built on a height commanding it, stood the church, its finger pointed to heaven, its masonry rich and heavy, permanent and menacing, a constant reminder of the domination of the Church down all the ages. For although these deeply Catholic people had been burning their churches for centuries, the Church and its allies had always reasserted their power over the people, and this power was in dispute again to the endless hills, carved from root to summit with stone-shored terraces to hold the olives and the vine fields, quiet evidence of thousands upon thousands of grinding hours of man and woman labor. Sunny Spain, land of mañana, where nothing was done today that could be put off till tomorrow!"

- Alvah Bessie

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"You know what I got half a mind to do?" the driver said. "What?" "Head this damn junk for the border." "Have a cigarette," I said. I wondered if he would head for the border and what I would do if he did, but he didn't. "The detail's all fucked-up," he said. "Where's the Lincoln? Where's the Macpap? The British? The Franco-Belge? Nobody's seen fuck-all of 'em. The bastards are driving to the sea," he said. "Maybe they've got to Tortosa already; we'll find out. If France don't come in now, we're fucked ducks. Mucho malo," he said. "Mucho fuckin malo."

- Alvah Bessie

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"Every town along the Mediterranean shore was empty and deserted. The road was jam-packed with peasants evacuating toward the north, on mule-back, in donkey-carts, afoot. They looked at us in the cab of the truck, moving against the stream they made, and they kept moving. Hundreds were camped along the roads; hundreds were plodding north toward Barcelona, their few possessions, mattresses, blankets, household utensils, domestic stock, on their backs, in wheelbarrows or on their burros backs. Little children were walking, holding onto their mother's skirts; women carried babies; older children were driving goats, sheep; old men were helping old women along the road; their faces were impassive, dark with the dust of the roads and fields, lined and worn. Their eyes alone were bright but there was no expression in their eyes. Looking at them you knew what they were thinking: 'Franco is coming; Franco is coming.'"

- Alvah Bessie

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"Below us there were hundreds of men from the British, the Canadian Battalions; a food truck had come up, and they were being fed. A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, ascetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he worse steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them."

- Alvah Bessie

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"Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: "What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?" Matthews said nothing, but he took notes on a folded sheet of paper. "What's your name?" said Hemingway; I told him. "Oh," he said, "I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff." I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. "Here," he said, reading in his pocket. "I've got more." He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes."

- Alvah Bessie

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"The Swede who had walked in his sleep- he had not been wounded. Before we went into Batea he was in our peloton with Tabb and Moish Taubman and Johnson and Sid... He seemed to be stupid, but he wasn't. He never spoke, he never asked questions, but he had a face like a snake- he had the attentive expression of a reptile, pale, hard, unmoving eyes, a wide thin mouth, an impassive face. They said he had refused to retreat; he had set up his machine-gun on a hill, and told the others he was with, "Go on, I cover you." They left him there on the hill alone, his machine-gun banging away as the tanks came up."

- Alvah Bessie

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"Hemingway did not seem discouraged, but Matthews was. Hemingway said, sure, they would get to the sea, but that was nothing to worry about. It had been foreseen; it would be taken care of; methods had already been worked out for communication between Catalonia and the rest of Spain; by ship, by plane, everything would be all right. Roosevelt, he said, had made an unofficial offer- or so he had been told- to ship two hundred planes to France, if France would ship two hundred planes to Spain. That was one of the best things we had ever heard of Roosevelt, but where were they?"

- Alvah Bessie

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"I googled this guy, Roger Stone, because he looks like he pays black guys to bang his wife, And I found out in 1996 he was forced to resign from Bob Dole’s campaign for asking black guys to bang his wife. Not kidding! Look it up!"

- Michael Che

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States• Television personalities•
"Che’s outside perspective jokes are always at least designed to toss obstacles in the way of conventional wisdom, so him telling Americans excited about Stone’s arrest to calm down because Trump is “one tweet away from declaring a state of emergency and bringing back slavery” had punching power. Him noting how reports of “the White House” denying Trump’s involvement with the increasingly obvious conspiracy to conspire with Russia to gain said address is akin to Che claiming “I’m innocent, just ask my apartment” is a fine joke, too. Plus, seeding in the detail that Roger Stone once got fired from the Bob Dole presidential campaign for putting out swingers ads for black men to have sex with his wife into a setup about Roger Stone doing that was a crisp little reminder that the Trump administration remains beyond the reach of hyperbolical satire."

- Michael Che

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"Listen, Otto Von Crybaby, if you're so anxious to go to a country with an unpredictable megalomaniac in charge, just wait a year and you'll live in one!"

- Larry Wilmore

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Comedians from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Television producers• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Making or writing a movie, to me, is like building a watch because a watch is so small and you only can fit so many things inside it that all the pieces really do need to work together."

- William Eubank

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"When a man of forty marries a girl of twenty, it isn't her youth he's seeking but his own."

- Lenore Coffee

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"In most pictures today, the 'sex appeal' is primarily manifested through the feminine characters. But women, as I said before, constitute by far the greatest portion of all audiences. It should be aimed at them. It is an almost indefinable thing. I should call it a hint of great capacity for emotion, a capacity which can only be tapped by a touch on a hidden spring, seldom found. Take, for instance, and William Boyd, who played what might almost be called a double lead in the last picture I did for Cecil DeMille. In both of them 'sex appeal' will be strikingly manifested. Between these two men I have appealed to every potential feminine spectator of the picture. And that is the way 'sex appeal' should be directed, not to the men, but to the women, I believe."

- Lenore Coffee

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"They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion -- and what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune."

- Lenore Coffee

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"I met him one day coming out of Louis B. Mayer's office, and he told me Mr. Mayer had been telling him how much he liked the picture we had done. Mr. Brown said, "I told him, 'Give me writers like Lenore Coffee, and I'll give you stuff like that all the time." I put my hand on his shoulder, and I said, "Goodbye, Clarence." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I'll never work for you again. This is a producer's studio. They don't like teams of writers-directors." And I never worked for him again."

- Lenore Coffee

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"I look back on my forty years in Hollywood with nothing but pleasure. If you can work forty years in Hollywood without getting your throat cut, you can count yourself lucky."

- Lenore Coffee

• 0 likes• Catholics from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from San Francisco•
"I have seen Family Portrait. I went into the theatre with a chip on my shoulder and came out on my knees."

- Lenore Coffee

• 0 likes• Catholics from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from San Francisco•
"Coffee took pride in her sharp eyesight (no need of eyeglasses); she continued to read avidly (mostly romantic paperbacks), to talk of writing (although her hands were not up to it), and to be witty and sharp-tongued. The afternoon visit with her was memorable for its bon mots, its rambling panorama of Hollywood life, and the sly, sexual innuendo so surprising in a woman whose storytelling roots were essentially Victorian (and Roman Catholic). One could detect a sense of what a feisty and inventive writer the young Lenore Coffee must have been, fresh off the train in 1919; what a formidable presence she must have been in a roomful of male studio executives."

- Lenore Coffee

• 0 likes• Catholics from the United States• Novelists from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from San Francisco•
"I lead a very interesting life. Every day there is something very different, enticing, and exciting that happens to me or around me. I am into acting and directing for the stage and screen, and all human triumph and failure, our planet Earth, long distance open ocean sailing, ecology, hydrology, astrophysics, geology, botany, and history. Part of my lifestyle you should all remember is having fun. Being funny is a big part of it. After all, if one is in tune, funny is the tune to play. Giving laughter is more fun than giving advice. Giving laughter while giving advice is the jackpot."

- Peter Fonda

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Atheists from the United States•
"I believe that one is only truly free when learning, and one can only learn when one is free."

- Peter Fonda

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Atheists from the United States•
"I was very dirty back then. Even now, I’ll look back on those days and think: ‘God, you were disgusting.’"

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"All of these people in the industry kept on telling me: ‘You’re likable and you’re cute, or whatever, but the jokes are really dirty and you’d get booked a lot more, and you’d be a lot more appealing if they were clean’…Maybe people were half-laughing, half-cringing at my jokes. But if you’re successful, people should be too busy laughing to cringe."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"Maybe it’s because women feel they want to maintain some mystery that they’re not gross, to be more attractive or something. For me it’s all part of intimacy. That’s how I define intimacy – living closer and being more honest, closer to what your real desires are – and it’s exciting."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"I see kids and how young they really are and I cannot imagine them coming on a boat by themselves, going to another country to work and be separated from their parents. It really humbles me and makes me grateful and it gave me a huge sense of…It’s part of my identity and gave me a very strong work ethic."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"I think [if you] consume mainstream pop culture and don’t activate a search for any other niche outlets then you can fall into this feeling that you are inferior."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"You know, it's tough when you have to wait around for other people to write something for you, because there's no precedent for someone who looks like you to play certain characters, right? So it's such a unique character that I've been dying to see and put on camera for a long time, that [Park] plays. And that's something for me that's really personal."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"...Not at all. It’s interesting. I was an Asian-American studies major in college. For a long time, I thought I would go into academia and become an Asian-American professor, and then I fell in love with stand-up comedy. I never set out to specifically speak about representation though — it’s so hard to even just make a joke. I do whatever is first and foremost funny and interesting. Sometimes that happens to concern Asian-American identity, but not a lot of it. But it is something I will always be interested in."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"I want to have it all. I want to have a family, a career, and a side piece."

- Ali Wong

• 0 likes• Actresses from San Francisco• Comedians from San Francisco• Screenwriters from the United States• Vietnamese Americans• Chinese Americans•
"I wanted to make it clear that the show’s about a matriarchy. I wanted it to be clear that power can be ugly, and a matriarchy is just as ugly as a patriarchy. It may look a little different, but power is bloody."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"…I also wanted to make sure no one tried to make her “save the cat.” To me, Camille is an inherently kind person despite everything that’s happened to her. And you see that when you walk through the day with Camille. You see how she treats people. But she’s not running around saving babies and kittens just so the audience can be sure she’s a good person."

- Gillian Flynn

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"I think there’s a deep societal fear of female rage, partly because it hasn’t been experienced a lot. Men—I speak in vast generalities—are often very afraid of what they don’t know how to handle. And they haven’t had to handle female rage a lot, and they think they need to handle it."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"It’s incredibly misogynist to tell me I can only write a certain type of woman. Because that’s saying women must be a certain type of person. That puts us back to the Stone Age—like women are saints and therefore not human and if we stray beyond that model, we’ll be severely punished. It denies us any humanity. It doesn’t even bother me. It just bounces off me. It’s such a ridiculous notion that my novels are misogynist because I don’t write the kind of women you want."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I loved being scared as a kid. I loved the darker side of humanity. That was in my brain, even from a very early age. I was always thinking, “What could be the scariest outcome of this situation?” My cousins and I were kind of raised in a pack together—all girls. They always wanted to be princesses. I always wanted to be a witch. Or a killer. My head just went in that direction. Maybe because my father was a film professor, I developed a taste for Alfred Hitchcock. Films like Psycho scared me just the right amount. They didn’t haunt my dreams in a terrible way. I like that sensation of being scared. I’ve always been one of those people who wants to know what’s underneath the rock, what’s down the corner, what’s down the blind alley."

- Gillian Flynn

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"If you are someone who reads books to feel like you have a friend on the page, my book is not going to be the book for you…I write for people who are readers the way I'm a reader. I don't care if I dislike a character; I care if I find them interesting or they make me laugh, or if I'm trying to figure them out. I am always more interested in that."

- Gillian Flynn

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"I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm. I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations—bulkily, unnaturally—just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don’t care."

- Gillian Flynn

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"Sleep is like a cat: it only comes to you if you ignore it."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"…soldiers on the battlefield of consumerism, armed with vinyl-covered checkbooks and quilted handbags."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial."

- Gillian Flynn

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"I can see people milling about under the fluorescent lights. It’s the kind of place where people mill about."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I’m so much happier now that I’m dead."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)"

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"The media has saturated the legal environment. With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate. Eighty, ninety percent of the case is decided before you get in the court room. So why not use it—control the story."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"You can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I don’t want to be married to a woman like you. I want to be married to a normal person."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"She already has the righteous, eye-rolling cadence of a conspiracy crackpot. She might as well wrap her head in foil."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me? He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you. But he said, “Because I feel sorry for you.” “Why?” “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”"

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I’m typically not into thrillers, but her books are so pleasurable to read. I can stay up all night reading them because I simply can’t live without knowing what happens next. Her women characters are so flawed and broken and interesting. Those are my favorite kind of characters for reasons that are probably very obvious."

- Gillian Flynn

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Women journalists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I mean, I’m middle class. I’m upwardly mobile. I’m not a communist; I’m not a socialist. But when I visit the prisons, when I see the new homelessness in L.A., when I see a declining middle class and the growing Occupy movement in a rich-get-richer America, I find that the remnants of colonialism are alive and well. In the barrios, on the reservations, and certainly in parts of the Sonoran desert on the American side…"

- Richard Montoya

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Theatre directors•
"We thought that would be fun to honor the people that do the mundane daily chores, the people that are part of the work service backbone of places like Los Angeles and Orange County…So much effort is made to vilify [these people]."

- Richard Montoya

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Theatre directors•
"Luis Valdez said it long ago: The beauty and the frustration of theater is it is one permanent long shot…You never get up close in someone’s eyes. And that kind of blew me away (while shooting) a close-up. That was all new storytelling for me, and I had to figure it out on a very fast learning curve."

- Richard Montoya

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Comedians from the United States• Theatre directors•
"People would call us "dirty Mexicans." I remember going to a movie in Reedly where we weren't allowed to sit in the Anglo section. We were told by the ushers to sit with the rest of the Mexicans, because this section was reserved for whites. Those are things you never forget."

- Luis Valdez

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"We were and still are recreating our own reality. Our vision is that we have been a hard working, courageous people. There have been three prevalent images of the chicano in this country— 1) the pachuco, a violent, urban vato loco; 2) the farmworker, a passive peon, Don Juan-Yaqui brujo type; and 3) el Spanish grandee or Latin lover type."

- Luis Valdez

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"My parents were migrant farm workers who moved between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. I was born in Delano and that's where the ranch was. For my dad, this was the high point of his life. The whole family was very proud of the fact that he had a ranch and we had family events out there. When we lost it at the end of the war it was a tragedy. We were back on the migrant path, and I remember asking my older brother, "What happened? We used to be rich." And he said, "We weren't rich, we just had the ranch and it wasn't even ours." He was older so he was wise to the fact that the Japanese-Americans had been forced out. I realized with a shock and a sense of guilt that we'd taken over somebody else's ranch and they'd been imprisoned in a camp."

- Luis Valdez

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"It was bad enough in 2013, and it's worse now. My approach to political theater is that the way to the mind is through the heart. If you can touch the heart, then people will come to the ideas themselves. The American idea of social equality and human respect has to be constantly defended from generation to generation. What happened to the Japanese is echoed tragically in what's happening to Latinos on the Mexican border. Those are prison camps and in some ways the Trump administration is declaring war on Latin America. It's a struggle, but I'm also an optimist and I know it won't last forever."

- Luis Valdez

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"History echoes. We mustn't ignore the past, because we're constantly reliving it. Just like the seasons that these farm workers organize their lives around, it's all a big cycle."

- Luis Valdez

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"I came into it equipped with these principles because of my Asian-American-studies background, but there was certainly a negotiation that had to take place just for me to get a foot in the door."

- Randall Park

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Los Angeles• Comedians from the United States• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"What happens when you populate a movie with a lot of Asian-American people is that they get to be people."

- Randall Park

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Los Angeles• Comedians from the United States• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I was super-excited to do it, but I still felt a little nervous about it and I felt like my parents would be a good way for me to test if this was OK…They’re immigrants, and they understand what’s going on over there a little better than me…As soon as I brought it up to them, they thought it was hilarious."

- Randall Park

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Los Angeles• Comedians from the United States• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"To us, it was important throughout the writing process that we put things in that were funny, number one, but also that felt like they came from a real place. And the conversations these characters have, reflect on the conversations we have. For us, it didn’t really feel like we were making any commentary or making any stereotypes, it was really us trying."

- Randall Park

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Los Angeles• Comedians from the United States• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"My overall philosophy was to continue to do good work, to expand my range, and to show that range. I think Hollywood can certainly try to put you into boxes. My entire career has been somewhat of a reflection of my college theater experience, and that was, I did everything. Not only did I do Shakespeare and Molière, but I did Mamet and John Patrick Shanley; contemporary playwrights. I was writing in college, I was directing in college, and when I got to Hollywood, I tried to continue that. I think my first three roles in Hollywood are somewhat indicative of that. You’ve got 'La Bamba,' then 'Stand and Deliver,' then 'Young Guns.' All three films are very different, and all three characters are extremely different."

- Lou Diamond Phillips

• 0 likes• Asian Americans• Actors from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Theatre World Award winners•
"Once you wrap your brain around playing your age, it's a very, very positive thing…"

- Lou Diamond Phillips

• 0 likes• Asian Americans• Actors from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Theatre World Award winners•
"When I did La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, I marched with Cesar Chavez and fasted with him. Whatever I have directed, I've flipped roles to be more inclusive of ethnic, female and LBGQ performers. This is a flag I've waved from the beginning. I got into the door and kept my foot in it so others could come in behind me."

- Lou Diamond Phillips

• 0 likes• Asian Americans• Actors from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Theatre World Award winners•
"I have never felt that Hollywood is mine, and I've never felt like the King of Hollywood. I've always felt lucky to be included... to be invited to the party. I guess because I've never expected my career to be as successful as it has been – I'd still be acting for free in Dallas, Texas if La Bamba had never come along. This has always been my love and my passion – my work – and so to be doing it at the level I'm doing, I'm quite happy…"

- Lou Diamond Phillips

• 0 likes• Asian Americans• Actors from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Theatre World Award winners•
"I love these characters that have a duality to them. I wanted to be Han Solo not Luke Skywalker. It’s more realistic for me, nobody is that square, especially in today’s world. We all have two sides to us, and that’s what makes us human. I love the movies where everybody was an outlaw in some way…"

- Rick Yune

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Martial artists•
"I mean there’s something magical about filmmaking and people that work within film. It’s the most beautiful thing, because so many people are coming together and they just think about a common goal. It’s almost similar to the military, but all of a sudden you’ll be in there and you’re about to do something and everybody is thinking about the next person. It’s not always the case, but the films that I’ve worked on it’s been that way, and it’s amazing. It makes you want to work harder…"

- Rick Yune

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Martial artists•
"In my opinion, as far as action is concerned, and physical action, the punches and kicks, they don’t really matter. Even shooting a gun. It all depends on, for me, what your intention is, what you put behind it and how it serves the film…"

- Rick Yune

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Martial artists•
"Part of my heritage being Korean, it's going to be interesting going to Korea and answering these questions dealing with North and South Korea. It's difficult to deal with at times, this expectation. Being Asian, every single Asian person in the world expects you to represent them, you know?"

- Rick Yune

• 0 likes• Korean Americans• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Martial artists•
"I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope..."

- Migdalia Cruz

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Composers from the United States• People from New York City•
"Respect your history, listen to your ancestors, tell the truth, and write your own story—or someone else will write it and get it all wrong."

- Migdalia Cruz

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Composers from the United States• People from New York City•
"When I was 8, my best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building. That's when my serious writing began--when writing became an outlet for me to express my feelings and emotions…That is when I began to understand the power of writing. Other kids played stickball; I'd write weird journal entries."

- Migdalia Cruz

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Composers from the United States• People from New York City•
"I think the audience I'd like to reach is increasingly an audience that stays home--a poor audience, a Latino audience, people of color, or people who feel disenfranchised. They're not going out and they don't feel entitled to theater. Theater is becoming more and more elitist because we just do it for each other. It seems that there are more theater people at the theater than regular people, and that's not good."

- Migdalia Cruz

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Composers from the United States• People from New York City•
"I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying."

- Charles Fuller

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Pulitzer Prize winners• People from Philadelphia•
"What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings."

- Charles Fuller

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Pulitzer Prize winners• People from Philadelphia•
"We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything."

- Charles Fuller

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Pulitzer Prize winners• People from Philadelphia•
"We speak [in traditional portrayal] one abominable language—hip; we have one interest—women. Our lives have no beginning, no ending. We’re highly emotional in terms of reactive violence, and we do not use our minds in any way."

- Charles Fuller

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Pulitzer Prize winners• People from Philadelphia•
"The thing that drew me to Forster most specifically, I think, looking back on it, was I was picking up on what I would call 'the vibrations’…And 'the vibrations' were a closeted gay man in the early 20th century, at that time, speaking to a closeted gay boy at the end of the 20th century."

- Matthew Lopez (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Florida•
"There is also the inheritance to younger gay men, of the generation that is coming up right now, of a responsibility and a debt to the generation that came before them…The generation that fought tirelessly to be able to walk down the street and hold your partner's hand, to kiss your husband in public, to get married, to just truly be accepted for being who you are and loving who you love."

- Matthew Lopez (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Florida•
"I can never predict what is going to capture my interest and draw me to create. I think it comes primarily from curiosity. I like to play the “what if” game with subjects. “What if slaves owned by Jewish families adopted that religion?” “What if a family living in the proposed footprint of Lincoln Center in 1959 were completely devoted to Jerome Robbins and his work?” “What if a straight guy became a drag queen?” That leads to the next important question of “why?” And then “who?” And so on."

- Matthew Lopez (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Florida•
"A lot of people want to tell me their stories, and it’s not just the people who were alive back then. Though the play deals with AIDS, it’s about more than just the epidemic. It deals with things that plague gay men now. It’s very much about addiction, too. And the audience’s experiences run the gamut. And these audiences feel emboldened in the best way possible to not keep secrets. And they feel like they trust us enough to tell us their stories. It’s a beautiful thing."

- Matthew Lopez (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Florida•
"At that time the army had just been integrated in the States. And it was one of the few industries that offered black people the possibility of advancement if you did a good job. Most industries didn’t have that then: you were the last hired and the first fired. He was in Vietnam and we were sitting waiting, and we were luckier than some because he was able to come home and live a pretty good life."

- Suzan-Lori Parks

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Musicians from Kentucky• Novelists from Kentucky•
"Black people have had to become great at seeing ourselves where we are not present because that’s where we grew up. I see myself in Downton Abbey. Even before they introduced the black character, I was right there. Some weeks I was upstairs, some weeks I was downstairs! But it is different when you have a character who looks like you, so I’m glad to have plugged that gap a little bit."

- Suzan-Lori Parks

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Musicians from Kentucky• Novelists from Kentucky•
"I am the white woman character, black woman character. I am the black man character, the white man character…I have to stand in that person’s shoes."

- Suzan-Lori Parks

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Musicians from Kentucky• Novelists from Kentucky•
"It’s like a fairy tale…[Fairy tales] give you a context in which to talk about some things that you’re experiencing in your day-to-day. Theatre works in the same way—if it’s good theatre. When it’s well-crafted, well-honed, it opens wounds for the purpose of encouraging conversation while also giving us the tools with which to have that conversation."

- Suzan-Lori Parks

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Musicians from Kentucky• Novelists from Kentucky•
"I was living in Miami. Some people would say, ‘You were very young when you came from Cuba. How did you know us?’ They think I’m portraying Cuba, I said, ‘No, I’m portraying Miami. I’m portraying what I saw in Miami.’"

- Luis Santeiro

• 0 likes• Cuban Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Cuban exiles• People from Havana•
"We would get letters from Nebraska. I’ve talked to Latin Americans, whether they’re from Colombia [or elsewhere], and they have somebody like that in their family…If you make it authentic, if it touches you, it doesn’t have to be your experience."

- Luis Santeiro

• 0 likes• Cuban Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Cuban exiles• People from Havana•
"We went to the visual and the acting. You would lose some jokes if you didn’t speak both languages, but you didn’t lose the thrust."

- Luis Santeiro

• 0 likes• Cuban Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Cuban exiles• People from Havana•
"The teenagers have been sucked into American culture overnight, while their parents are concerned with preserving roots."

- Luis Santeiro

• 0 likes• Cuban Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Cuban exiles• People from Havana•
"The Vietnam War was raging at that particular time, so I wanted to do a positive play about a country character who was yearning for his home, as I was doing at Christmas…I drew on my experience growing up in the country - plowing mules, cropping tobacco, bootleggers, going to church. The rest was my imagination. I wanted to do something that could be performed on the streets - I love street theater. And I wanted my character to have a conscience."

- Samm-Art Williams

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from North Carolina• Screenwriters from the United States• Guggenheim Fellows•
"I am more interested in how the human being approaches the issue instead of trying to write about the issue itself because we really know what the issues are in this life regardless of what we’re talking about…"

- Samm-Art Williams

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from North Carolina• Screenwriters from the United States• Guggenheim Fellows•
"I would like to see a character make his stand on what he things [sic] about it because that way I think I can get into the humanness of people, and that’s really where my head is."

- Samm-Art Williams

• 0 likes• African Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Actors from North Carolina• Screenwriters from the United States• Guggenheim Fellows•
"The hardest thing about being a black writer in this town is having to pitch your black story to white execs…Also, most of the time when we go into rooms to pitch, there’s one token black executive that sometimes can be a friend and sometimes can be a foe. I wonder if they think it makes me more comfortable, if that makes me think that they’re a woke network or studio because they’ve got that one black exec. It feels patronizing. I’m not against a black exec. I want there to be more of them."

- Lena Waithe

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Actresses from Chicago• LGBT people•
"Being black and gay, having dreadlocks, having a certain kind of swag, and dressing the way I do…‘That’s dope, you’re cool.’ I don’t feel validated by that. . . . I don’t want to be White. I don’t want to be straight. I don’t want to blend in. . . . I try to wear queer designers who happen to be brown and makin’ shit."

- Lena Waithe

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Actresses from Chicago• LGBT people•
"Stop giving a s— what other people think of you. We make decisions too often based on that…When we start to live for ourselves, and be a little bit more selfish, I think we’ll lead more fulfilling lives. So I think what we need to do, is stare at ourselves in the mirror a little bit longer, and really own who we are and not try to be what we think others want us to be."

- Lena Waithe

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Actresses from Chicago• LGBT people•
"I'm a person that documents the lives of people of color…So that way, when we're gone, no one will forget we were here."

- Lena Waithe

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Actresses from Chicago• LGBT people•
"…I think the most important thing for me is to give flesh and blood reality to people who are far away and distant from most American concerns. It's very easy to stick to the one-dimensional labels, and my hope is to completely explode the labels and reveal the flesh and blood and soul of each of the women in the play and to really make it impossible to walk away from the play with your prejudices still intact…"

- José Rivera (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• People from San Juan•
"I have a natural tendency toward theatricality and poetic language...I've never really written realism…and I wanted to give it a shot."

- José Rivera (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• People from San Juan•
"I was lucky…because my grandparents, who lived with us, were illiterate but they were great storytellers, so I got a kind of storytelling bug from them."

- José Rivera (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• People from San Juan•
"…I like “mad realism.” I grew up with a mother who wanted to be a nun and we had pictures of angels all over the house. My grandparents told ghost stories. Seeing magic in the world just felt like how you perceive life. I didn’t know anything about magic realism, really, until I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in college and suddenly everything that I grew up with was there on the page — the same love stories, stories of obsession, stories of interacting with spirits…"

- José Rivera (playwright)

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• People from San Juan•
"I have a strange love and affinity for South Texas and Texas in general. I carry a bit of dissonance for loving a place so many people outside of Texas hate. The reputation Texas has in places that I have lived is a rough one. The politics have skewed so far to the right and I’m usually in an environment that is mostly liberal so I find myself having to defend a place I no longer live in. But the Texas I know, the people I know, the experiences I’ve lived don’t always sync up with the image of Texas at the moment."

- Mando Alvarado

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Texas•
"A play is like a free-flowing poem in some ways. The play, as you write, will tell you what the structure will be. But, sometimes you forget to ask those questions as you write and you end up spending a lot of time trying to find the essence of the play…"

- Mando Alvarado

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Texas•
"When I left South Texas, I realized that I became the other. I was the token of the room. Most of my friends were white so when I went to a party or a wedding or a work function, I would scan the room and only see my face in the people who were serving the drinks or passing around the appetizers. I realized I was the hanging fruit in the room, the living and breathing statue in the room, the object in the middle of the photograph, surrounded by white eyes."

- Mando Alvarado

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Texas•
"It’s what I know best. It’s roots. It’s Dazed And Confused and Friday Night Lights. It’s border life and El Pato and Whataburger and getting drunk in a back of a pickup. It’s dancing every weekend to country music, or Tejano music, or club music. It’s the beach. It’s, for better or worse, home."

- Mando Alvarado

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Texas•
"My grandfather saw a lot of violence and a lot of poverty, and really was incredibly, deeply tortured by it. It was always this elephant in the room that we never talked about growing up. He spoke fluent Spanish, but never in front of us. I think he was really afraid that we would be judged and held back by our Mexican heritage, like he was. Part of writing this play was like digging up my own family ghosts and things that I personally had always been afraid to talk about, because my family never talked about them. Also, because I’m Mexican and I’m white, I often struggle with wondering if I’m “allowed” to tell stories through this lens; growing up, the white kids always told me I was Latina or “ethnic,” and the Chicano kids always told me I was a “gringa,” so I never really felt like I fit in anywhere…"

- Hilary Bettis

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from South Carolina•
"There is no one answer about why women are historically, across just about all of civilization, treated this way. It’s economics, it’s religion, it’s the reality of sex and pregnancy for women. It’s these value systems that get passed down from generation to generation that need questioning…Women haven’t survived for eons by being “weak” and “emotional.” We’ve survived by being a hell of a lot tougher and braver than we’re given credit for…"

- Hilary Bettis

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from South Carolina•
"If you and your children were starving, if you saw violence and murder every single day, and just on the horizon is a safe country where people are allowed to dream, can make a decent living, of course you would cross the border. Any mother or father in their right mind would. We need to have compassion for this."

- Hilary Bettis

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from South Carolina•
"It’s really a play about these big ideas that don’t have any sort of definitive conclusion…What I hope people get out of it is—as uncomfortable as it is—to be able to live in these gray areas of conversation that none of us have answers to and see the humanity in people, even if you don’t agree with them."

- Hilary Bettis

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from South Carolina•
"…The reason I write the plays is to open up some sort of dialogue or just to have this in the conversation. I mean what I would love is to have the guy—the Republican who thinks that the only issue is keeping brown people away—he is my ideal audience. That's who I would love to have in the audience. So I get a little bit tripped up because, on one hand, I want plays that my family can go to. You don't have to be an artistic person. You can go in and actually get something from it."

- Matthew Paul Olmos

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Los Angeles•
"…With theatre, I’m attracted to stories of social or political relevance to the world we all live together in… With film or TV, I approach them much more as an audience member—stories I’d like to see…"

- Matthew Paul Olmos

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Los Angeles•
"…what I’ve learned about it throughout the years is that it’s my way of giving voice to the often voiceless; I write mostly about the sort of people on the opposite end of flush, and so when I hear them speak in this kinda jagged form of poetry, it moves me in a way I can’t even really describe. Technically speaking, some actors sing it beautifully, others can’t wrap their minds around it."

- Matthew Paul Olmos

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Los Angeles•
"…I like the word impressionistic more than experimental for some reason. I think experimental, I think of abstract language met with geometric stage gestures, while my writing tends to be worlds and people that we know and recognize, but the rules have changed on them. And on us, the audience, but the struggle is that I want the audiences to not spend time trying to figure out the rules, rather to accept them and see what it means to them as the world unfolds."

- Matthew Paul Olmos

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Los Angeles•
"I’ve always resisted being called a ‘gay’ or a ‘Latino’ playwright…I certainly talk about them in my plays, but I don’t want to be defined by them. Not because I’m not proud — but the minute you define yourself in a certain way, there are huge assumptions about what you’re supposed to be. And those boxes don’t really fit anymore."

- Christopher Oscar Peña

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from California• Educators from the United States•
"I’m a little bit highbrow and a little bit trashy…That’s what I think good storytelling is. If you can lure in an audience and have a good time with them, but also teach them what it’s like — to be a person of color, to be poor — that’s a success."

- Christopher Oscar Peña

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from California• Educators from the United States•
"Some writers write every morning, or every day. I don´t tend to do that. I am of the Wendy Wasserstein mind. Going to the movies is research. Walking down Central Park and seeing cute boys in tank tops is research. Going to the Museum of Modern Art is research. Having dinner with my best friends is research. Because research, when it comes to being a playwright, most importantly means living. It means experiencing and engaging with the world…"

- Christopher Oscar Peña

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from California• Educators from the United States•
"i think its important to write plays that aren’t safe. often, that means that you are criticizing the institutions who’s help you need getting produced. and often, that means that you are engaging with audiences in ways that aren’t easy for them. every time i start a new play, it feels like the first time. it’s terrifying. it’s daunting. it feels impossible. i think that is a tremendous undertaking. [sic]"

- Christopher Oscar Peña

• 0 likes• Hispanic Americans• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from California• Educators from the United States•
"Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"For me it was a lot like using music. I used it when I felt that it was right, when I felt like it was time."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"I grew up on the experimental cinema coming out of New York and San Francisco in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"Elephant, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, is Van Sant's masterpiece."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"I've stayed in touch with Gus over the years, and there have been a couple of things that were looked at, but never quite worked. But I was always interested in working with him again, because he was so instrumental in the kind of actor I am. I worked with him at a really crucial part of my career. I hadn't worked since I was a kid, and then I worked when I was 19 years old. He really changed the way I thought about acting. So I was really eager to work with him again. The process was incredible. In some ways, it was like being back in '95 or whenever it was."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"It was such a privilege to work with Gus — a true luxury for me, as watching ‘My Own Private Idaho’ almost 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me, it made me understand who I am in a delicate way."

- Gus Van Sant

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Painters from the United States• Photographers from the United States• Musicians from the United States•
"I was just walking across the street . . . this guy [a porn producer] stops and he gets out his car and he gives me his card, and I thought about it for about two weeks. Then you made the mistake of saying yes and going in and . . . yeah, I did it for about three months, and as soon as I started to gain popularity, that's when I was like, "OK I need to get the F out of here, this is not what I was trying to do whatsoever." I just wanted to let loose and rebel."

- Mia Khalifa

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Models from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Beirut• Immigrants to the United States•
"Women's rights in Lebanon are a long way from being taken seriously if a Lebanese American porn star that no longer resides there can cause such an uproar. What I once boasted to people as being the most Westernized nation in the Middle East, I now see as devastatingly archaic and oppressed."

- Mia Khalifa

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Models from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Beirut• Immigrants to the United States•
"It all started to spiral out of control when the death threats from ISIS started coming in. That's when I stepped away. As soon as I started to gain popularity that's when I was like 'get the f*** out of this."

- Mia Khalifa

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Models from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Beirut• Immigrants to the United States•
"It gets me so down when I get 'no's' from companies who don't want to work with me because of my past, but I also thought I would never find a man like my fiancé. The fact that he appreciated everything I've done since porn meant so much."

- Mia Khalifa

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Models from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Beirut• Immigrants to the United States•
"Perhaps better known as 'The hijab porn star', Khalifa hit the headlines in 2014 when she infamously humped on camera wearing the traditional Muslim garb. The BangBros film initially sparked outrage in her home country of Lebanon with haters claiming she had brought disgrace to the nation and insulted Islam. Khalifa stated in an interview with Loaded that she felt she is being made a scapegoat for internet censorship in her native land, and many others there have since demonstrated against the government, showing support for the American porn star. They claim that although she may have sex, 'She is still more decent than they are'."

- Mia Khalifa

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Models from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Beirut• Immigrants to the United States•
"Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“Chicken?” “Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing. Join the club honey—guess what, there are a few more of us out here who’ve had our brains beaten our with our own dreams."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"I’m damned tired of being needed. Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“You know, it isn’t that you can’t get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms—tape, holographic computer feed.” He paused. “Tell me, Aubry—what’s the similarity between all the modes of information storage I’ve just named?” Aubry scratched his head. “They don’t take up as much space as books, I guess.” “Yes, that’s true enough—but as far as I’m concerned, the difference is that they all require an external power source.” He cocked his head sideways, until he looked absurdly like a bird examining a piece of fruit. “Do you understand that that makes you dependent upon others?” Promise ran her hands over the spines of a nearby stack, then shook her head. “Not cubes. There are plenty of solar-powered cube-readers. One sunny day a week, and you’re set.” “True enough, but you are still dependent upon others to repair your viewer if it breaks down...the more advanced a technology, the more fragilely inter-dependent it is.” “So what?” Warrick shrugged. “It just seems to me that the most valuable thing that any human has is the ability to educate himself, to find out about the world around him, to program his primary organ of perception—his brain. And that basic, inalienable right should be as independent of external factors as possible. Once a book is printed and acquired, it’s yours. Nothing else is needed except a pair of eyes and daylight. Individual books have lasted for hundreds of year—do you really think you can say the same of your little viewers, or computers, or whatever? If you have a hundred libraries stored on cube, and your viewer breaks down, you have nothing. Give me an encyclopedia, and if it isn’t totally destroyed by fire, I can dig it out, dry it off, piece it together, and still have something of value.” His gaze became direct, and piercing. “There is nothing more important than directing the flow of information into your mind. It determines all—your attitudes, your actions, your life. You can rely upon the visual and audible media all you want—but they should be in addition to reading, not in place of it. If other forms replace reading, then your input is restricted, and much more dependent upon other people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.” “So, that’s the most important thing you can think of in life? Reading?” Warrick sighed. “You are being obstinate, my friend. You learn if you learn.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"Hate comes from the past, fear from the future. Pain and pleasure are now, and therefore their own trap."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"Definitions are just words, just labels. And once you label something, the label gets between you and the thing."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“Don’t be afraid of dying. A Warrior lives with death, Aubry. Welcome it as an ally. All other fears are just fragments of death, forms of unbecoming. A fighter clings to life, and therefore cannot win. A warrior treats life and death as the same thing, and therefore cannot lose.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“It’s bigger than death, Aubry.” “You’re wrong,” he said, his voice utterly chill. “Nothing is bigger than death.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"Aubry looked at her without shifting his head. Damn, she was lovely. An unpleasant question remained: What where they to each other? It was hard to say sometimes. Did he truly feel love, or just the effects of the Cyloxibin mushroom? And was there a difference?"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"Lesbianism is the ultimate expression of a feminist philosophy."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"He had no choice. And that one thing turned Heaven into Hell."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” “Every man is a mirror,” Nozawa said flatly. “We all reflect what we see.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"No man escapes Death. So Death must not be the enemy. Life must not be the prize. It must be the gameboard, on which Death teaches its savage lessons. You could heed those lessons, or ignore them, but never evade them. Death, then, was the ally. Not to be sought, but heeded."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"It would have been a terrible thing to die a fool and a liar. Truth, at any cost, is worth the price."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"Truth could not be spawned in lies and deceit."

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"“That was what we were told. It doesn’t entirely ring true.” “Why not?” “Because the President of the United States is always bound by the deals that he makes to get to his position. Delacourte can’t make any kinds of drastic changes, regardless of what he claims. The chief executive isn’t an emperor.”"

- Steven Barnes

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors• Fantasy authors• People from Los Angeles•
"I figure there's two things in a movie: that you are looking at something, you are listening to something. So I like to put a lot of attention into the music and into the recording of the dialogue and into the sets."

- Anna Biller

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Los Angeles•
"I want to make films that are about visual pleasure for women. Not worry about whether they are in fashion, whether they are politically correct."

- Anna Biller

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Los Angeles•
"I always like to make the point, because people think you’re on RT, you’re told what to say, as you and I can tell people, I was never told what to say. I wrote all my own words, which for comedy shows is unheard of. These people all have teams of writers. I did not. I wrote every single word and was never censored. Now that being said, I could go after things that are completely hidden from mainstream media, things such as Israel being in apartheid state, things such as just big Ag. I mean, how often do you hear criticisms of big ag, which controls our government and is one of the largest environmental destroyers on this planet. Criticisms of so many corporate entity entities, whether it was or or . And not just go after them with a slight little joke, but go after them in a real deep and real way."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Jews from the United States• Television personalities• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I don’t think most Americans are happy with our political system. ... There are a lot of reasons so many people hate the two corporate parties, but one of the biggest ones might be just how thoroughly they are bought off by the “One Percent.” ... I’m referring to the One Percent who are disgustingly wealthy ... [who] essentially own all our politicians. ... yes, our politicians are more bought-off than ever before. A new analysis from Americans For Tax Fairness found that total billionaire contributions have soared over the past few years. The cycle before the Citizens United decision only saw $16 million worth of donations from billionaires to campaigns. This past cycle saw $2.6 billion worth of donations. And how does that much money impact our elections? Well, the candidate who spends the most wins in the Senate around 80% of the time and wins in the House close to 90% of the time. But the reality is actually worse than those two numbers illustrate because they don’t cover the fact that the two parties who spend the most money win 100% of the time — A third party (non-corporate) candidate basically wins 0% of the time."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Jews from the United States• Television personalities• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States•
"While we bicker day-to-day about this politician or that one, the true power players like the military industrial complex are doing things like creating A.I. that will control our future world. By keeping us preoccupied with nonsense, they can build our prison in peace & quiet."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Jews from the United States• Television personalities• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States•
"We desperately need a sociopath test for all politicians. We have the technology to find out if people lack empathy. If they do, they should be banned from running for office, serving on corporate boards, or having any kind of authority."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Jews from the United States• Television personalities• Actors from Washington, D.C.• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Over the past 2 months: - The entire conversation about policing in this country has changed - A multi-billion dollar oil pipeline has been canceled (ACP) - The fossil fuel industry has continued to collapse. Thank an activist!"

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"This pandemic is not just a crisis, it’s also a gift. It allows us the oxygen to notice the things we’ve been ignoring were the truly essential: – Learning and creating – Enjoying clean water, clean air, clean food, and making sure every human has that right – Forming a world that will last longer than an NFL season – Spending a lot of time with your beautiful family (or a little time with an unsightly one) Point is — the stuff that truly matters is the stuff we were completely ignoring, blithely pushing it to the back of our minds as our planet is eaten for corporate profit. But now, during “life on hold” the natural world reclaims spaces. Beaches around the globe teem with millions of birds and wildlife, no longer flooded by undulating masses of fleshy apes with our frisbees, and snorkels, and beer coolers and entitlement."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"Like cancer, capitalism grows until it murders the host body. During this pandemic shutdown, it’s not getting the growth it needs and parts of it are becoming benign...For years...we’ve been lost in the frenetic pace of lives based on non-events, never pausing to reassess or recess. The spastic motion of avoidance filled the ether — afraid if we stop to truly think about it, we may find our scant few years of consciousness are pissed away as slaves at often meaningless jobs. They, the pustulant corporate owners, suck away our lives...And now, with life on holiday, we see almost none of it was essential... As our planet disintegrates under the weight of consumption and greed, most people are trapped in extreme poverty. And that’s how the system of capitalism is designed. Slightly altering capitalism will not change this reality... If we take away the false promises of capitalism and just say to people, “Private luxury is only for a few humans. You will never have it and won’t even have the chance at getting it” – if we admit that – then the entire justification for capitalism evaporates... The pandemic shutdown has shown us the problem. It has revealed what the world looks like without as much pollution, without the chaos and roar of mostly meaningless “work” performed by the exploited, using materials stolen from the abused, for the benefit of the pampered and oblivious. Another world is possible, and we’ve just gotten a glimpse of it."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"Good ideas are like viruses. They grow and spread despite our best efforts to stop them. And yes, our bulbous, awkward species does indeed work very hard to catch and kill good ideas... Our electoral politics is a beautiful smokescreen for the ruling elite. But no matter what happens in these overtly rigged Democratic National Committee primaries (See: media manipulation, voter suppression, corporate spending, super delegates, unverifiable voting machines, etc. etc. etc.), those of us who care about the world and care about our fellow human beings are winning the war of ideas. Simply take a look at the ideas that are dominating the Democratic presidential race, even though the corporate media has tried to ignore these solutions, attack them, dispute them, and then ignore them all over again: 1) Medicare for All... 2) The Green New Deal... 3) Legalizing Marijuana... 4) $15 Minimum Wage... 5) Distrust of Mainstream Corporate Media... 6) Distrust of U.S.-Backed Coups and War Games... Sure, our elections are rigged in favor of the two corporate Wall Street-funded parties. And yes, our media is owned and operated by the largest, most aggressive corporations in the world leaving little to no room on the air for the anti-war activists offering free hugs and senseless acts of kindness. But that’s why it’s all the more impressive that in so many areas, we are winning the seemingly endless battle for the mindscape of our country."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"The corporations that are screwing up your life, tainting your water, polluting your air, buying up your favorite coffee shop and turning it into a gas station, sucking your tax dollars up through subsidies, and all the while paying their employees a warm can of farts per hour—those corporations are the same ones creating the climate catastrophe. In fact, The Guardian reported that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These include Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chinese and Russian coal, Chevron, BP, CNPC, ConocoPhillips, Gazprom, Lukoil, Total, Petrobas and many others. One hundred incredibly rich yet morally bankrupt companies.... The Carbon Majors Report revealed that more than half of all industrial emissions over the past 30 years were put out by just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. Twenty-five companies are killing us, smothering us, stealing our futures while choking us... The 100 corporations actively suffocating us in a blanket of global warming emissions are the same ones that run our government. They have wrapped their tentacles around our politicians, the regulatory agencies and the criminal justice system. It’s now one big, incestuous, money-obsessed pile of X-rated nastiness—and you and I are not part of it. We are the cannon fodder, the collateral damage, the chum. Until we stop these corporations, the expiration date of the human race is set in stone."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"I never thought I’d be the target of an NPR attack piece. Through my twenties I even looked to NPR as an outlet full of good, progressive, thoughtful reporting – You know, the soothing voices occasionally interrupted by music no one really listens to but that sounds good between soft-spoken ivy league journalists over the age of 50. Everything about NPR subtly reinforced the idea, “Everything is fine. You’re probably a middle to upper class white person or you hope to be one day, and that’s just great. Everything is fine.”.. Then I woke up. About the time NPR was avoiding Occupy Wall Street – or when they did cover it, acting like those of us who supported it were brainless hippies without a point or at least none that would fit easily into the lives of suburbanites with two kids, one cat, and a robust retirement account. In hindsight I should’ve woken up sooner. I should’ve seen the truth about the time most NPR shows were pushing for war in Iraq, buying into the WMD lie. Or maybe I should’ve realized the truth when Kevin Klose took over as President of NPR in 1998. Klose came straight from a nice seat as director of the US Information Agency, described as “a United States agency devoted to ‘public diplomacy’ (AKA propaganda).”"

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"This is the second major attack piece on me and my comedy show in recent months, one on NPR and one on the cover of the NY Times Arts section. These smear jobs are similar in nature, and I’m far from the only one experiencing such attacks. Many dissenting voices have been attacked, suppressed, and maligned, and it’s up to those of us who value truth and open debate to stand up and demand better. The good news is that corporate media and the profit-over-people they uphold are right now fighting for their lives, and the only way of maintaining their power is by drumming out those of us calling attention to the reality."

- Lee Camp (comedian)

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"Motion pictures are the most important contribution to literature and art since the invention of fiction."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Who can tell what the years of the future will bring to the art of the motion picture in view of the amazing progress of the past few years."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Motion pictures are visualized thought! Do you grasp how different that is from any other of the great arts? The printed word is reserved to those only who can read the language of the publication; music is for the ear that appreciates harmony (not every ear does that), but motion pictures are the universal language, as comprehensive to the American as to the Japanese, as understandable to the African as to the man in the Arctic. Motion pictures are human nature picturized and human nature is the same the world over in every clime."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Only those who day by day are in the midst of motion pictures can really appreciate the wonderful opportunities for extraordinary things which the camera permits, and although we are still more or less in the beginning of things (I do not like to think we have really touched the great springs of the art as yet) we are struggling, working, studying all the time to better the production."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Joan the Woman was the most interesting undertaking from the point of view of the artists and the director in the history of the pictures, I believe. It is entirely different from the spectacle features, as it is essentially drama, with the story always first and most important and the spectacular features secondary, although many critics have more than praised the battles and scenes of pageantry."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"The phrases, "happy ending" and "unhappy ending" are misnomers. They belong to an era when the public demanded a saccharine finish to every picture, irrespective of whether or not it was logical. Film-goers of 1933 insist upon a new standard in their screen entertainment. They are not particularly concerned about the ending of a picture so long as it is truthful. Naturally, they do not want a preponderance of depressing themes, but I am firmly convinced that they would rather witness a tragic finish that is truthful and logical than a sugar-coated ending that is not. In The Sign of the Cross the problem of bringing the story to a close is one that would have been difficult a few years ago, when the sugary tradition ruled the film industry. But now that the words "happy" and "unhappy" have been deleted from cinema terminology, our task was simplified, and we gave an ending which appeals to logic and intelligence."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Every year a new lesson is learned, but the one precept that never fails to be true is that a good picture will always be well received by the public. During 1933 particularly, the public displayed shrewd taste in supporting pictures which have been produced with great care and the finest of production materials."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Legend rides high with history, but truth follows a lonely trail. I've pursued verity from the museum at Cairo to the smoking tepees of the Cheyennes at Lame Deer, Montana."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Most people never achieve stardom until they've had at least one good, serious siege of the grand passion. It doesn't hurt a career. It helps. Leatrice Joy was a smart, capable girl, she had beauty and talent and everything to make her a star. But she was marking time. Then she fell in love with John Gilbert and married him. It changed her completely. She seemed to bloom and blossom. And this new radiance showed in her work. She went right on to the top."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"This bouquet is not given lightly. I've worked with many of the screen's greatest stars, and, if I were tendering posies merely to strike a popular chord, I should pick one of them. But Tamiroff is so far ahead of the field as a hard-working artist that he easily claims all awards."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Actors are born, and every human being is born an actor."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Sensible married women usually stop acting after the honeymoon—but not their husbands. Young men go on acting parts until they reach maturity, and from there to the grave they're preoccupied with the problem of acting normal. Most men, I'm sorry to say, are "hams" at heart."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"It's not just a good part, it's a great part, but until Miss Goddard passed her screen test as Louvette, I hadn't been able to find a Hollywood actress who both looked it and could play it convincingly. What most of the candidates lacked was imagination."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"This will probably be my last film—it will certainly be my biggest."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Cecil DeMille is a strict disciplinarian, but he is a great man to work with. DeMille, in handling big crowds and thousands of extras, shows a fine insight into human nature. . . Cecil DeMille shows a great interest and keenness in his work, and for months ahead will plan every move in a big scene with the aid of miniature sets and in discussion with his principal stars. If an actor or other player shows attention to his work, and interest and knowledge of his part, Cecil DeMille is anxious to help him in every way; but he resents the player who has no interest."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"No more conservative or patriarchal figure existed in Hollywood, no one more opposed to communism or any permutation or combination thereof, and no fairer one, no one with a greater sense of decency and justice."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"I took a cut in salary to work for DeMille; a lot of actors did; he seemed to expect it as a kind of due. There was only one DeMille and there wasn't an actor in the world who didn't want to work for him just once, however short the salary or tall the corn. I could still picture Angela Lansbury coyly running around in chiffon skivvies, letting arrows fly at the back end of a lion skin tacked on a patio wall in Samson and Delilah. I always thought that looked like good fun."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"He reminded me of the prestige gained in playing a major role in a DeMille picture, which was worth far more than the twenty-five thousand he wanted to pay me. I purposely allowed a frown to cross my brow, just to see if he had still more charm to zap me with. But that was it. He paused to wait for my decision. Did I want the part or not? I wanted it, I told him, even though he would be paying me about one-third my usual salary. What he didn't know was that I'd have done the part for nothing."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"Cecil B. DeMille, the producer-director of Samson and Delilah, always saw all of Hollywood to find the best people for his spectaculars. So when I got the call, I wasn't all that anxious to come in for the interview from Laguna, where I was living then. I thought, "Well, he's seeing everyone and now it's my turn." Meeting him in his office at Paramount, I found that he had an extensive knowledge of my entire career—that's how thorough he was. When the interview lasted four hours, I knew I was in."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"I loved DeMille and he loved me. We only made Union Pacific together, but we did lots of radio. We got along great."

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"There was an immediate rapport between us, and our relationship was more than director and star; there was a great friendship, and a great mutual respect. I loved the old buzzard. You either hated him or you loved him, there was no half-way measure at all. He liked me because I never "yessed" him, and contrary to popular opinion, DeMille hated yes-men. There were a lot of people around him who were yes-men because he was such a powerful producer-director, but they wouldn't last. He'd always say, "I don't want 50 little DeMilles running around—it's bad enough to have one!""

- Cecil B. DeMille

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"He wouldn't reveal his name but he agreed to answer all my questions... He said the Manuscript dates back to about 600 B.C. It predicts a massive transformation in human society... It's not religious in nature, but it is spiritual."

- James Redfield

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"We're discovering something new about human life on this planet, about what our existence means, and according to the priest, this knowledge will alter human culture dramatically. p. 6"

- James Redfield

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"The Manuscript predicts that... human beings will begin to grasp these insights sequentially, one insight then another, as we move from where we are now to a completely spiritual culture on Earth."

- James Redfield

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"The transformation is beginning with the First Insight, and according to the priest, this insight always surfaces unconsciously at first, as a profound sense of restlessness..."

- James Redfield

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"According to the Manuscript, we're beginning to glimpse an alternative kind of experience... moments in our lives that feel different somehow, more intense and inspiring. But we don't know what this experience is or how to make it last, and when it ends we're left feeling dissatisfied and restless with a life that seems ordinary again."

- James Redfield

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"We're all looking for more fulfillment in our lives, and we won't put up with anything that seems to bring us down. This restless searching is what's behind the 'me first' attitude that has characterized recent decades, and it's affecting everyone, from Wall Street to street gangs... And when it comes to relationships, we're so demanding that we're making them near impossible."

- James Redfield

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"While most of society's recent ills, can be traced to this restlessness and searching, this problem is temporary, and will come to an end."

- James Redfield

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"We're finally becoming conscious of what we're actually looking for, of what this other, more fulfilling experience really is. When we grasp it fully, we'll have attained the First Insight...."

- James Redfield

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"The First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives."

- James Redfield

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"Coincidences are happening more and more frequently and that, when they do, they strike us as beyond what would be expected by pure chance."

- James Redfield

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"They feel destined, as though our lives had been guided by some unexplained force. The experience induces a feeling of mystery and excitement and, as a result, we feel more alive."

- James Redfield

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"More people every day are convinced that this mysterious movement is real and that it means something, that something else is going on beneath everyday life. This awareness is the First Insight... a reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet."

- James Redfield

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"We are experiencing these mysterious coincidences, and even though we don't understand them yet, we know they are real. We are sensing again, as in childhood, that there is another side of life that we have yet to discover, some other process operating behind the scenes."

- James Redfield

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"Certainly this consciousness has been experienced and described before... the Manuscript says the number of people who are conscious of such coincidences would begin to grow dramatically... He said that this growth would continue... we would reach a specific level of such individuals a level I think of as a critical mass."

- James Redfield

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"The Manuscript predicts... that once we reach this critical mass, the entire culture will begin to take these coincidental experiences seriously."

- James Redfield

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"We will wonder, in mass, what mysterious process underlies human life on this planet. And it will be this question, asked at the same time by enough people, that will allow the other insights to also come into consciousness because according to the Manuscript, when a sufficient number of individuals seriously question what's going on in life, we will begin to find out."

- James Redfield

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"The scholars who first translated the Manuscript were absolutely convinced of its authenticity. Mainly because it was written in Aramaic, the same language in which much of the Old Testament was written. Aramaic in South America? How did it get there in 600 B.C? The priest didn't know... Does his church support the Manuscript?.. Most of the clergy were bitterly trying to suppress the Manuscript. p. 9"

- James Redfield

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"Did he say why most church officials were fighting against it? Yes, because it challenges the completeness of their religion. Apparently the... insights extend some of the church's traditional ideas in a way that alarms the church elders, who think things are fine the way they are. p. 9"

- James Redfield

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"The Eighth Insight... is about using energy in a new way when relating to people in general, but it begins at the beginning, with children... We should view them as they really are, as end points in evolution that lead us forward. But in order to learn to evolve they need our energy on a constant basis, unconditionally."

- James Redfield

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"Haven't you ever been around someone who makes you feel guilty when you’re in their presence, even though you know there is no reason to feel this way?... it's because you have entered the drama world of a poor me. p.81"

- James Redfield

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"Most of the people I talk with haven't even heard of the Manuscript. They come up here and are entranced by the energy. That alone makes them retthink their lives...They seem to find me. p. 84"

- James Redfield

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"Cardinal Sebastian... Apparently... is using his influence with the government to increase the military pressure against the Manuscript. He has always preferred to work quietly through the government rather than force a division within the church. Now he is intensifying his efforts... Except for the few priests of the Northern Council and a few others like Julia and Wil, no one else seems to have copies any longer... the scientists at Viciente... the government has closed it down. All the scientists were arrested and their research data was confiscated... that research wasn't accepted by most scientists anyway. The government is apparently selling the idea that these people were breaking the law... they’re keeping it very quiet, the government is intensifying its crackdown."

- James Redfield

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"How can you remain so calm? What if they come crashing in here and arrest all of us? They gazed at me patiently, then Father Sanchez spoke. Don't confuse calmness with carelessness. Our peaceful countenance is a measure of how well we are connected with the energy. We stay connected because it is the best thing for us to do, regardless of the circumstances. You understand that, don't you?"

- James Redfield

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"Staying connected, Father Carl said, will be easier once you get clear on who you are."

- James Redfield

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"How do I start getting clear about myself?"

- James Redfield

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"The process of finding your true spiritual identity involves looking at your whole life as one long story, trying to find a higher meaning. Begin by asking yourself this question: why was I born to this particular family? What might have been the purpose for that? p. 86"

- James Redfield

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"You're looking for the meaning... [your mother's] life has for you, the reason you were born to her, what you were there to learn. Every human being whether they are conscious of it or not illustrates with their lives how he or she thinks a human being is supposed to live. You must try to discover what she taught you and at the same time what about her life could have been done better. What you would have changed about your mother is part of what you yourself are working on... how you would improve on your father's life is the other part."

- James Redfield

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"We are not merely the physical creation of our parents; we are also the spiritual creation. You were born to these two people and their lives had an irrevocable effect on who you are... you were born.. to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what these two people believed. p. 88"

- James Redfield

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"You can go to sleep and never think again of what we have discussed. You can go right back into your old drama, or you can wake up tomorrow and hold on to this new idea of who you are... If you view your life as one story, from birth to right now, you'll be able to see how you have been working on this question all along. You'll be able to see how you came to be here... and what you should do next."

- James Redfield

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"The worst thing that can be done to children is to drain their energy while correcting them. This is what creates control dramas in them, as you already know. But these learned manipulations on the child's part can be avoided if the adults give them all the energy they need no matter what the situation. That is why they should always be included in conversations, especially conversations about them."

- James Redfield

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"Wil's drama was to be aloof... each of his parents was an interrogator and each had a strong philosophy they wanted Wil to adopt. Wil's father was a German novelist who argued that the ultimate destiny of the human race was to perfect itself... His wife was a Peruvian who grew up in America and was educated there. She was a writer too, but she was basically Eastern in her philosophical beliefs. She held that life was about reaching an inner enlightenment, a higher consciousness marked by peace of mind and detachment from the things of the world. According to her, life was not about perfection; it was about letting go of the need to perfect anything, to go anywhere... These two people had prepared Wil to work on integrating the main philosophical differences between Eastern and Western cultures."

- James Redfield

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"When Wil began to discover the insights, his whole life began to flow. p. 91"

- James Redfield

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"Each of us must look at the significant turns in our lives and reinterpret them in light of our evolutionary question... Try to perceive the sequence of interests, important friends, coincidences that have occurred in your life. Weren't they leading you somewhere? p. 92"

- James Redfield

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"You should never take responsibility for more children than you can give attention to. p. 118"

- James Redfield

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"My mother was a Christian reformer. She hated the use of guilt and coercion when evangelizing. She felt that people should come to religion because of love, not out of fear. My father, on the other hand, was a disciplinarian who later became a priest, and like Sebastian, believed adamantly in tradition and authority. That left me wanting to work within church authority, but always seeking ways it should be amended so that higher religious experience is emphasized. p. 139"

- James Redfield

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"The Ninth Insight explains how human culture will change in the next millennium as a result of conscious evolution. It describes a significantly different way of life."

- James Redfield

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"The Manuscript predicts that we humans will voluntarily decrease our population so that we all may live in the most powerful and beautiful places on the Earth. But remarkably, many more of these areas will exist in the future, because we will intentionally let the forests go uncut so that they can mature and build energy."

- James Redfield

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"According to the Ninth Insight, by the middle of the next millennium, he continued, humans will typically live among five hundred year old trees and carefully tended gardens, yet within easy travel distance of an urban area of incredible technological wizardry."

- James Redfield

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"The means of survival food stuffs and clothing and transportation-will all be totally automated and at everyone's disposal. Our needs will be completely met without the exchange of any currency, yet also without any overindulgence or laziness."

- James Redfield

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"Guided by their intuitions, everyone will know precisely what to do and when to do it, and this will fit harmoniously with the actions of others. No one will consume excessively because we will have let go of the need to possess and to control for security."

- James Redfield

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Methodists from the United States• People from Alabama•
"The Ninth depicts a human world where everyone has slowed down and become more alert, ever vigilant for the next meaningful encounter that comes along. We will know that it could occur anywhere: on a path that winds through a forest, for instance, or on a bridge that traverses some canyon."

- James Redfield

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"Can you visualize human encounters that have this much meaning and significance? Think how it would be for two people meeting for the first time. Each will first observe the other's energy field, exposing any manipulations. Once clear, they will consciously share life stories until, elatedly, messages are discovered. Afterward, each will go forward again on their individual journey, but they will be significantly altered. They will vibrate\ at a new level and will thereafter touch others in a way not possible before their meeting."

- James Redfield

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"The Manuscript says our natural pursuit of the truth will lead us there."

- James Redfield

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"Think about what has occurred already in this millennium. During the Middle Ages we lived in a simple world of good and evil, defined by the churchmen. But during the Renaissance we broke free. We knew there had to be more to man's situation in the universe than the churchmen knew, and we wanted the full story."

- James Redfield

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"The real reason we spent five centuries creating material supports for human life was to set the stage for something else, a way of life that returns the mystery to existence."

- James Redfield

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"That is what the information now returning from the scientific method indicates: mankind is on this planet to consciously evolve. And as we learn to evolve and pursue our particular path, truth by truth, the Ninth Insight says the overall culture will transform in a very predictable way. p.143"

- James Redfield

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"Evolve! Evolve! Listen to yourself, Father, you have always fought against the influence of evolution. What has happened to you?"

- James Redfield

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"Yes, I fought against the idea of evolution as a replacement for God, as a way to explain the universe without reference to God. But now I see that the truth is a synthesis of the scientific and religious world views. The truth is that evolution is the way God created, and is still creating. p. 151"

- James Redfield

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"The Manuscript describes the progress of succeeding generations as an evolution of understanding, an evolution toward a higher spirituality and vibration. Each generation incorporates more energy and accumulates more truth and then passes that status on to the people of the next generation, who extend it further."

- James Redfield

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"Isn't the story of the scriptures a story of people learning to receive God's energy and will within? Isn't that what the early prophets led the people to do in the Old Testament? And isn't that receptivity to God's energy within what culminated in the life of a carpenter's son, to the extent that we say God, himself, descended to Earth? Isn't the story of the New Testament... the story of a group of people being filled with some kind of energy that transformed them? Didn't Jesus, himself, say that what he did, we could do also, and more? We've never really taken that idea seriously, not until now. We're only now grasping what Jesus was talking about, where he was leading us. The Manuscript clarifies what he meant! How to do it! p. 151"

- James Redfield

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"We weren't able to maintain the vibration... Fear lowers one's vibration tremendously."

- James Redfield

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"The Ninth Insight says that while some individuals may cross over sporadically, a general rapture will not occur until we have abolished fear, until we can maintain a sufficient vibration in all situations."

- James Redfield

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"We can't do it yet but the role of the Ninth Insight is to help create that confidence. The Ninth Insight is the insight of knowing where we are headed. All the other insights create a picture of the world as one of incredible beauty and energy, and of ourselves as increasing our connection with and thus seeing this beauty."

- James Redfield

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"The more beauty we can see, the more we evolve. The more we evolve, the higher we vibrate."

- James Redfield

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"The Ninth Insight shows us that ultimately, our increased perception and vibration will open us up to a Heaven that is already before us. We just can’t see it yet."

- James Redfield

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"Whenever we doubt our own path, or lose sight of the process, we must remember what we are evolving toward, what the process of living is all about. Reaching heaven on Earth is why we are here. And now we know how it can be done... how it will be done."

- James Redfield

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"Before she could finish, a burst of machine-gun fire ripped up the stone tiles by our feet. We all dived to the ground, our hands raised. No one spoke as the soldiers came and confiscated the papers and took each of us in a different direction. p. 155"

- James Redfield

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"After a while, the conversations became almost cordial. Everyone began to treat me as a guiltless victim of this plot, as a gullible Yankee who had read too many adventure tales and found himself lost in a foreign country. And because my energy was so low, I possibly would have become vulnerable to this brainwashing, had something else not occurred. I was suddenly transferred from the military base where I was being held to a governmental compound near the airport in Lima-a compound in which Father Carl was also being detained. The coincidence brought back some of my lost confidence. p. 156"

- James Redfield

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"Connecting with energy is something humans have to be open to and talking about and expecting, otherwise the whole human race can go back to pretending that life is about having power over others and exploiting the planet. If we go back to doing this, then we won't survive. Each of us must do what we can to get this message out. p. 157"

- James Redfield

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"James Redfield's breakout 1993 novel, The Celestine Prophecy, brought forward Eastern philosophies and New Age spirituality to a primarily American audience... used a traditional narrative to transmit concepts of spiritual awakening, energetic fields and synchronicity to the reader. In 1993, these concepts were still emerging, and have since become hugely popular in mainstream books, movies and music. The book spent an incredible 165 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller's List, making it one of the most successful books of all time. It has sold over 50 million copies to date, and established James Redfield as a millionaire."

- James Redfield

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"The thing nobody ever tells you about marriage is that sometimes it makes you lonelier than being alone ever could."

- Michael Ian Black

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Those people with a sense of humor get by more comfortably than those who don’t."

- Carl Reiner

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"Every morning I pick up my newspaper, get the obituary section, see if I'm listed, and if not, I have my breakfast."

- Carl Reiner

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"What I mean, you can’t just go ahead and foist on the consumer some gimmick that potentially could undermine our entire social and economic system. Simply because the consumer wants it."

- Harold Livingston

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"Flash turned and looked over his shoulder. I was there, all right, some distance away but close enough for Flash to realize I would always be there, waiting, ready to overtake him the first instant he faltered. He knew it, and I knew it, and we neither of us harbored any ill feeling because of it. It’s the way of the world, the business world."

- Harold Livingston

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"“Which brings up a small matter I want to discuss.” I said nothing. When your superiors bring up small matters they want to discuss, it’s always wise to maintain a watchful silence. I know of no small matters that make pleasant conversation."

- Harold Livingston

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors from the United States• Novelists from Massachusetts•
"When a man knows what he is talking about, his voice crackles with authority."

- Harold Livingston

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors from the United States• Novelists from Massachusetts•
"Already, less than five minutes after being fired, I was on the contagious list. A leper is more welcome than a discharged employee."

- Harold Livingston

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors from the United States• Novelists from Massachusetts•
"Henry Chatterly’s mouth became a fine, narrow line across the lower half of his face. His eyes glittered hard, in for just one instant that fresh-faced youth, Ivy League appearance vanished. It was like The Picture of Dorian Gray, only instead of a depraved old man I saw a storm trooper."

- Harold Livingston

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors from the United States• Novelists from Massachusetts•
"“We’ll be doing all humanity a service.” “May I ask who appointed you humanity’s savior?” “My conscience,” I said unhesitatingly. “And my common sense.” “An honest reply,” he said. “I like that in young men. You have the courage of your convictions, something you don’t often find in the younger generation.”"

- Harold Livingston

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Science fiction authors from the United States• Novelists from Massachusetts•
"I’m a Canadian Catholic woman, so I’m hardwired to apologize."

- Catherine O'Hara

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Comedians from Canada• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I think everyone is born with humor, but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it."

- Catherine O'Hara

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"Why work alone if you don’t have to? It’s all give and take. It’s all about listening to others and contributing. Even if you didn’t want to act, improv classes are great, because they teach you about conversation."

- Catherine O'Hara

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Comedians from Canada• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"There’s a certain confidence, too, I think time can give you. It’s like if you have faith in God, you have the confidence of knowing I’m just one little speck. I am just one little thing on this earth, and I don’t have to be everything."

- Catherine O'Hara

• 0 likes• Comedians from the United States• Comedians from Canada• Screenwriters from Canada• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry. Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them – the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome. It's like trying to turn around an army of tanks, instead of being able to move lightly on your feet or being able to listen to what's going on inside of you – because that's what's telling you what to do. It gets bogged down."

- Don Bluth

• 0 likes• Animators• Game designers• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think the destiny of all men is to be kings, the destiny of all women is to be queens. In some fashion or another, that's the destiny that we call it family but it's supposed to be that."

- Don Bluth

• 0 likes• Animators• Game designers• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"My whole goal, besides trying to get more production value back into animation, was really to provide an environment like there was at Disney at one time, where you felt secure as an artist, filmmaker, contributor, animator. You could plan your life, have a place to raise your family, have a home and not worry about living like a gypsy. Personally, I can say I've been in the business for 28 years and have never been unemployed...though sometimes not paid. We've done our best to try to take care of our people. We've done our best to try to make good stories. How many people have gone out and hired sometimes over 500 people and come up with over $450,000 a week in salaries and still tried to create a quality product? It's not an easy thing to do...but it gives a great feeling of accomplishment."

- Gary Goldman

• 0 likes• Animators• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from Oakland•
"God just put a love for it inside of me, I love telling stories, drawing and painting. Animation is a fairly solitary art form. But what happens when you sit in a theater with an audience and you hear their audible responses to your work—the crying, the laughter—there is nothing like it. I just love storytelling. I am a ham actor with a pencil. I love performing on canvas or on paper or right now on a digital screen."

- John Pomeroy

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"I don’t think I've ever made up anything, everything has happened. Nothing's made up. You don't have to make anything up in this world."

- Thomas Harris

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"Some days you go to your office and you're the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in."

- Thomas Harris

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""You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time". (Ch. 25)"

- Thomas Harris

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"When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it's funny"

- Sam Hyde

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from Massachusetts• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Satirists from the United States•
"I think as my career has gone on, my friends and I have been generating more and more beautiful or poignant moments. That’s not to say that everything we do is genius. But along the way there’s a lot of broken eggshells. There’s a lot of things we’ve said that’s retarded or not funny or goes over the line. That’s what happens when you’re trying to do what we do. And we tend to slant more out of bounds than other people do. So if people get pissed off in the process, that sucks. That’s not a good thing."

- Sam Hyde

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from Massachusetts• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Satirists from the United States•
"Don't worry so much about money. Worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. That's a quote. For the reason why, you can say I want reporters to know I make more money than them, especially Matt Pearce."

- Sam Hyde

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from Massachusetts• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Satirists from the United States•
"Hasan Piker I'm coming to kill you, ... no in real life"

- Sam Hyde

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from Massachusetts• Authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Satirists from the United States•
"[Question from the audience]: "If you could pick only one thing, what is the most important thing when it comes to creating and running your own series?"Craig McCracken: Characters. Great, likable characters that resonate with audiences. That's the most important thing. Concepts will get you to try out a show, to tune in to a show maybe, but concepts don't keep you watching over and over again. If you're not engaged with the characters and the personalities of the characters, you're not going to continue to watch that show."

- Craig McCracken

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"A lot of people come up with these really elaborate concepts, and they get into the weeds of the concepts and how the story's gonna be. That's not what executives wanna see. They wanna see characters that they can engage with, and, also it sounds a little cliche, but the so-called "elevator pitch" or seven words, "try to describe your show in seven words", is a really good exercise. I found it just... work through, y'know, what your idea is about. That elevator pitch is basically "I've got a few seconds to tell somebody my idea, how would I say it?""

- Craig McCracken

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"The main inspirations for Powerpuff for me were the '66 Adam West Batman show, and Underdog."

- Craig McCracken

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"When I first did my first short for Powerpuff Girls, and we focus-tested it, I'm sure people have heard this story, we showed it to a group of 11-year-old boys, and they said "this is the worst cartoon that has been ever made and whoever made it should be fired." I'm sitting in the room with all the executives watching these 11-year-old boys destroy the show, and... I was like, I went back to the studio and I started redesigning the characters and I gave 'em fingers and I made them more accessible, and I was like "they didn't get it, they didn't get it..." [...] I took that criticism and went, "what did I do wrong? What wasn't I communicating? How I was I not telling this idea clearly?" And what I realized I was doing, is I had been making it in my head for so long, I made an episode that was like a third season, middle-of-the-season episode. And I'm like, "No, you gotta go back to the very beginning of the idea" [...] and just kind of step the audience through the idea and introduce them. Even though it seems like old hat to you, and you're like "well that's boring", but that's what the audience wants. Tell them a story. Who are they, these characters? Why should I like them? Don't be so ironic or high-concept-y."

- Craig McCracken

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers•
"When I was a kid I spent a lot of time playing with the artisticly rooted pieces of junk that George was selling me. My wife Lauren did the same the only difference was her junk was pink and had combable hair. Either way these toys were far from junk, in fact they were our lives. Everyday we would make up characters, worlds, and adventures for them. Lauren's My Little Pony world was no less valid than My Little Star Wars world.So imagine little Lauren's surprise when she heard there was going to be a cartoon of her favorite toy! Imagine her dissapointment when the cartoon didn't live up to the world she had created in her head. Maybe she wouldn't have been so upset if she realized that cartoon was only bad because it was produced by a bunch of dudes who couldn't believe they were working on My Little Pony, uggggh. Imagine if they let HER make it, she knows why girls like Pony, she knows what will make it fun and cool.Now imagine 30 years later in some crazy cosmic coincidence she actually does get a get a chance to finally bring that world she's had in her head since she was a little kid to life! Maybe just maybe if she can traverse the waters of notes, schedules, and executives she can finally inject a little a artistic integrity and creative vision into it and make a MLP that girls will actually really like.Heck I even like it now and I hated that lame Pony junk, it wasn't cool like my Star Wars junk."

- Craig McCracken

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"When [Powerpuff Girls] was tested, everyone hated it. There were 11-year-old boys telling me I should be fired and it was the worst cartoon they've ever seen in their life."

- Craig McCracken

• 0 likes• Animators• Cartoonists from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers•
"What a lot of people have found out about Powerpuff Girls is initially they just think it's this little girl thing that's lame like My Little Pony or whatever. Then they watch it and they’re like "Wait a minute, this is really funny, and this is really good, and it's actually, you know, entertaining.""

- Craig McCracken

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"I have a pretty good idea what is funny but if you do it twice in one day in front of a live audience. They will let you know if they like it or not."

- Brian Doyle-Murray

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Nothing compares to getting a laugh. You have to assume it on something like voice work."

- Brian Doyle-Murray

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"This is not cinema harnessing life; this is life harnessing cinema. Not a film. An attempt at a film. The imperfect effort is ever present, mischievously decorating every frame. Reminding us: one never actually makes a film—one merely attempts to make a film. Reminding us: one never actually lives—one attempts to live."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"All lovers are runaways, are fugitives. Inheriting the entire world on that journey. Escaping to one another."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Nostalgia is an illness. A symptom of the dying, of those who have more life behind them than before them."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Media technology will place a barrier before us. The barrier of a mirror. It is too loyal to history and the history it preserves will become constantly present. No longer a cultural past merely documented, but a past alive. Eternal. So that it is no longer past, but a continuous present that cycles and repeats endlessly, disallowing the possibility of a future. Static memory. Memory uninterrupted by the present."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Collective subversion is conformity. The only true revolution is the singular one."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"There is no artistic worth in compromise, in a pair, in collaboration, in obedient unity. These are all impossible terms. Action must come from the individual. The group (even if just a population of two) is only capable of reaction."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"(Lydia) Lunch and a lot of the no wave musicians were imbued with the wisdom—and neuroses—of genuine trauma. There's the divine madness in them. When Suicide's Alan Vega sneered, you might have actually found yourself bloodied shortly thereafter. You sure as hell wouldn't reach for your iPhone to Instagram and tag his #antics. You'd feel a little intruded upon, which is precisely how all the best art should make you feel."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Love is at essence ritual of tandem fate, of harmonized experience. It’s a holy thing, that merging of consciousness. Our minds become authored by so many of the same events, colored by so much mutual memory."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Love is never more than a faith, and that’s why it’s so exciting."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Patience is the only honest muse. In writing, in painting, and especially in photography."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Don’t hunt for what to photograph. Let images find you. You wander your desert until worthy mirage appears. Wait until that worthy shot comes. And then try to capture it."

- Scott Crary

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"Photography is a hunt. But one that ends in the immortality of the prey, rather than the prey’s death."

- Scott Crary

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"Film photography just makes such an ally of chance, and chance is essential to any valid art, to the poetic…to life, to the spiritual."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Any art should be advertising for one's soul."

- Scott Crary

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"Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too."

- Scott Crary

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Editors from the United States•
"Making a documentary is like having a dream. You can’t really anticipate what it will be. You have to constantly yield to whatever is manifested before you, to have the courage for whatever is revealed to you. Whatever truth confesses itself, even if it’s not what you anticipated. To just be a mirror. To invite in whatever arrives. To reflect it as loyally."

- Scott Crary

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"(William) Burroughs was all about the future. Was all about liberation through the dismantling of presiding orders. He was a big influence on punk culture and punk music (and me) for that reason."

- Scott Crary

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"We see our cities crumble under the enemy’s bombs, and we mourn for our children struck at their early tasks by the enemy’s bullets, and we strike back, cruelly and wildly, from the seabed of our hatred, at his cities and his children. The enemy is more savage than the tiger, hungrier than the shark, crueler than the wolf; in honor and in defense of our moderate way of life, we stand up to him and combat him, but in doing so we out-tiger him, out-shark the shark, over-wolf the wolf. Will we at the end of all this then pretend to ourselves that the victory is ours? The thing we defend perishes from our victory as it would never perish from our defeat."

- Irwin Shaw

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"Do not boast to me in your newspapers of the thousands of tons of bombs you have let loose at random on the unhappy land of Germany, because I will tell you that you have let loose those bombs on me, on your church, on yourselves and on your God. Tell me, rather, how you have wept for the single German soldier you have been forced to kill as he stood before you armed and dangerous, and I will say, you are my defender and the defender of my church and my England."

- Irwin Shaw

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"Kill, if you must, because in our weakness and in our error, we have found no other road to peace, but kill remorsefully, kill with a sense of sorrow, kill with economy for the immortal souls who leave this life in battle, carry mercy in your cartridge cases, forgiveness in your knapsacks, kill without revenge, because vengeance is not yours but the Lord’s, kill, knowing that each life you spend makes your life that much the poorer."

- Irwin Shaw

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"To the Generals eighty miles away, the reports on casualties are encouraging. To the man on the scene the casualties are never encouraging. When he is hit or when the man next to him is hit, when the ship fifty feet away explodes, when the Naval Ensign on the bridge is screaming in a high, girlish voice for his mother because he has nothing left below his belt, it can only appear to him that he has been involved in a terrible accident, and it is inconceivable at that moment to believe that there is a man eighty miles away who has foreseen that accident, encouraged it, made arrangements for it to happen, and who can report, after it has happened (although he must know about the shell, about the listing Landing Craft Infantry, about the wet decks and the screaming Ensign) that everything is going according to plan."

- Irwin Shaw

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"The exiles, living in mud and fear of death, had, in one way at least, found a better home than those from which they had been driven, a blood-spattered Utopia, now on the fringe of German soil, where no man was rich and none poor, a shell-burst democracy where all living was a community enterprise, where all food was distributed according to need and not according to pocket, where light, heat, lodging, transportation, medical attention, and funeral benefits were at the cost of the government and available with absolute impartiality to white and black, Jew and Gentile, worker and owner, where the means of production, in this case M1s, 30 caliber machine guns, 90s, 105s, 204s, mortars, bazookas, were in the hands of the masses; that ultimate Christian socialism in which all worked for the common good and the only leisure class were the dead."

- Irwin Shaw

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"Never rub another man's rhubarb."

- Jack Nicholson

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"If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women."

- Jack Nicholson

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"I’m definitely still wild at heart. But I’ve struck bio-gravity."

- Jack Nicholson

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"Getting older is great, but I think bravery also comes with having a good career and high status. The world has shown me that bravery and honesty tends to be the better route. And I want to set an example for my daughter."

- Rachel Bloom

• 0 likes• Actresses from Los Angeles• Comedians from Los Angeles• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"…We’re starting to have those conversations and it’s messy, because it’s stuff that we haven’t reckoned with, ever…Like, everyone has always known not to grab an butt, or to not say point blank, ‘You’re a woman – you’re not funny.’ But even just 10 years ago, no one would have talked about a cultural problem in comedy."

- Rachel Bloom

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"…He had always known the situation was messed up, but it took me calling him out. I told him: ‘I’ve been pissed at you. This was terrible and it hurt me and what you did was wrong’…[he did it] because he was afraid, because he was working on a script with these guys. It was bros before hoes."

- Rachel Bloom

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"People can’t be creative if they feel threatened. You need people saying random weird stuff without feeling their boss will yell at them. And it worked. I think there has been an awakening of compassion, since, a reckoning with privilege."

- Rachel Bloom

• 0 likes• Actresses from Los Angeles• Comedians from Los Angeles• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"When you get to do a one-shot, the whole world is open to you. It’s almost harder to decide what story to tell when you have the freedom to do anything you want!"

- Nicole Dubuc

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from California•
"For me, the story always comes from character whether they're ponies or robots or aliens."

- Nicole Dubuc

• 0 likes• Actresses from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from California•
"If I had any advice to give, it's to be your own toughest critic when you write a spec or pitch -- a great idea goes a long way, but it's important to craft and polish your work so that you're communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, and that they're as entertaining as can be (remember, competition is stiff). And if you're pitching, put yourself in the mind of the producer or executive you're pitching to: figure out how to make your idea specific to the show, yet be inventive -- they'll want to hear something they might not have come up with on their own, that's why they're taking pitches in the first place."

- Duane Capizzi

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"Usually when I need to name a character, I look around the studio and see who I could hand 15 nano-seconds of fame to."

- Duane Capizzi

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"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

- Nathanael West

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"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

- Nathanael West

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"When I walk down the street, I need everyone to like me so much. It's exhausting. My wife said that walking around with me was like walking around with someone who's running for mayor of nothing."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"If you’re an adult male who sees no flaws in his father, you’re an insane person."

- John Mulaney

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"I was a cool person at one time. I used to do cocaine."

- John Mulaney

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"It's been proven that people will take information from a female voice, but they will only take a warning from a male voice. Now that's its own American gender nightmare that we don't have time to get into."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"If there's a hell, I think it's an encyclopedia, and you can just look up what everyone in your life thought about you. And if there is a heaven, it's a wikipedia, and you can just change that."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"From an early age, I tried to be funny for the adults. [...] I think I thought and feel still that I have to provide that in order for people to like me."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"I was working with these kids ages 8-13, and I thought, oh, I remember being that age, and that is the state I would like to be in. Because they were very kind, they were very thoughtful, and they also knew that they had no control over their lives at all."

- John Mulaney

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"Your dad has no friends. If you think your dad has friends, you're wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad's friends."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"It is a leap year, as I said. Leap year began in the year 45 B.C. under Julius Ceasar. This is true. He started the leap year in order to correct the calendar and we still do it to this day. Another thing that happened under Julius Ceasar was, uh, he was such a powerful maniac that all the senators grabbed knives and they stabbed him to death. That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back."

- John Mulaney

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"I dislike the Founding Fathers immensely."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"Apparently I have no boundaries. And I need 'em."

- John Mulaney

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"I've never understood being goth, you know. I could never do that, I could never dress goth. And don't get me wrong, I'm unhappy, it's not that."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"Travelling can get kinda lonely sometimes, or, not travelling, what is the word? Uh, life, life can get kinda lonely. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and I'll be like, "yeah, I've been really lonely lately", and he'll be like, "well, we should hang out", and I'm like, no, that's not what I meant. Not what I meant at all."

- John Mulaney

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"I'm not saying it's a bad movie. It is, but that's not my point."

- John Mulaney

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"I've been trying to follow the news more this year, I've been trying to be much more involved in the news. You know, I read that this week over two days, the Dow Jones dropped 929 points, and I can't tell you how frustraing it is to not know what that means. It's getting embarassing."

- John Mulaney

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"To me, at this point, like, Donald Trump is not just a rich man, like, Donald Trump is almost like what a hobo imagines a rich man to be. No, it's like years ago, Trump was walking through an alley, and he heard some guy just like, "oh boy oh boy, as soon as my number comes in, I'm gonna put up tall buildings with my name on 'em. I'll have fine golden hair, and a TV show where I fire people with my children." And Trump was like, "that is how I will live my life"."

- John Mulaney

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"You know, for years scientists have wondered, can you make grown men and women weep tears of joy by playing Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual", and the answer is: Yes. You can. As long as it is preceded by seven "What's New Pussycat"s."

- John Mulaney

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"My mom would blame me for things that happened on the news. That is true. I woke up one morning when I was a kid, and my mom was standing over my bed, and she said: "I just heard that Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed have been killed in Paris", like I had something to do with it. [...] Luckily, I had a good alibi, since I was in Wisconsin and twelve."

- John Mulaney

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"When I was in grade school, I was bullied for being Asian American. And the biggest problem with that is that I am not Asian American."

- John Mulaney

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"13-year-olds are the meanest people in the world. They terrify me to this day. [...] Eighth-graders will make fun of you, but in an accurate way. They will get to the thing that you don't like about you. They don't even need to look at you for long, they'll just be like, "hey, look at that high-waisted man, he got feminine hips". And I'm like, "no, that's the thing I'm sensitive about!""

- John Mulaney

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"I'm one of the worst drivers I have ever seen, and I just want you all to know that, if you're ever on the highway behind me, I hear you honking, and I also don't want me to be doing what I'm doing."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"It is so much easier not to do things than to do them that you would do anything is totally remarkable."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"In terms of like, instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin."

- John Mulaney

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"A "hero" is any man who does his job. You a lot of times see headlines that are like, "hero tutor teaches after school", and you're like, yeah."

- John Mulaney

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"I have a girlfriend now myself, which is weird because I'm probably gay, based on the way I act and behave and have walked and talked for 28 years. I think I was supposed to be gay, I think like in heaven, they built like three quarters of a gay person, and then they forgot to flip the final switch, and they just sent me out, and it was like, "you marked that one gay, right?", and it was like, "oh, no, was I supposed to?", and they were like, "oh, man this will be a very interesting person"."

- John Mulaney

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"You know those days when you're like, "this might as well happen". Adult life is already so goddamn weird."

- John Mulaney

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"I don't like confrontation, 'cause I've never been in a fight before. Though maybe you could tell that from the first moment I walked out on stage. I don't give off that vibe. Some people give off a vibe of, like... Right away, they're like "Do not fuck with me." My vibe is more like, "Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I'll probably apologize to you.""

- John Mulaney

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"It's just creepy to have an ex out there after things have ended badly. They have a lot of information. Anyone who's seen my dick and met my parents needs to die. I can't have them roaming around."

- John Mulaney

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"I was raised Catholic. I don't know if you can tell that from the everything about me."

- John Mulaney

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"For those of you who aren't Catholic, I don't mean to exclude you, although we love to exclude you."

- John Mulaney

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"I like having a puppy that's a bulldog, 'cause it's like having a baby that is also a grandma."

- John Mulaney

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"2029? That's not a real year. By 2029, I'll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas."

- John Mulaney

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"Real estate agents have to deal with the dumbest people in the world making the biggest decisions of their lives."

- John Mulaney

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"I got offended on behalf of my imaginary kids. [...] My children are not gonna be playing out on grass. They will be up in their rooms playing violent video games and catfishing pedophiles."

- John Mulaney

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"I didn't mean to make it sound like we don't want children. We don't, but I didn't mean to make it sound like that."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"College is just your opinion. Just you raising your hand and being like, "I think Emily Dickinson's a lesbian." And they're like, "Partial credit." And that's a whole thing."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"Marijuana is legal in, like, 18 or 19 states in one form or another. It's insane. Yeah, well... All right, don't "whoo" if you're white. It's always been legal for us."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"You remember being 12, when you're like, "No one look at me or I'll kill myself.""

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"I loved being a temp, because I would just go from office to office and be terrible at a different job for a week."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"Crazy people are like that. They have unlimited crazy currency. [...] The things they say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me."

- John Mulaney

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"I know now that I'm definetely never gonna be president. Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly."

- John Mulaney

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"The greatest assembly of them all, once a year, Stranger Danger. [...] You are gathered together as a school and you are told never to talk to an adult that you don't know, and you are told this by an adult that you don't know."

- John Mulaney

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"College was like a four-year game show called Do My Friends Hate Me or Do I Just Need to Go to Sleep? But instead of winning money, you lose $120,000."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen and then I didn't."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"I'm gross. I have hair on my shoulders now. I don't even have a joke for that, that's how much I hate that shit."

- John Mulaney

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"I don't know what my body is for other than just taking my head from room to room."

- John Mulaney

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"Famous people are weird as shit. They're all weird. Your suspicions are correct."

- John Mulaney

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"That's how I walk into rooms. I'm 35 years old, I am six feet tall. I lower myself, I go, "Hi. Knock knock." I say "knock, knock" out loud."

- John Mulaney

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"The world is run by robots, and we spend most of our day telling them that we're not a robot just to log on and look at our own stuff."

- John Mulaney

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"You spend most of your day telling a robot that you're not a robot. Think about that for two minutes and tell me you don't want to walk into the ocean."

- John Mulaney

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"Building a gazebo in the middle of the civil war, that'd be like doing stand-up comedy now."

- John Mulaney

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"Now, I don't know if you've been following the news, but I've been keeping my ears open, and it seems like everyone everywhere is super-mad about everything all the time."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"And now there's nazis again. When I was a kid, nazis was just an anology you would use to decimate your child during an argument at the dinner table. Now there's new nazis. I don't care for these new nazis, and you may quote me on that. These new nazis, "Jews are the worst, and Jews ruin everything, and Jews try to take over your life." It's like, you know what, motherfucker? My wife is Jewish. I know all that, how do you know all that?"

- John Mulaney

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"I'm allowed to make fun of my wife. I asked her and she said yes. [...] I said, "Do you mind if I still make fun of you on stage?" And my wife said, "Yeah, you can make fun of me. But just don't say that I'm a bitch and that you don't like me." I was like, "Whoa, the bar is so much lower than I ever imagined. That's it?" [...] Also, I would never say that, not even as a joke, that my wife is a bitch and I don't like her. That is not true. My wife is a bitch and I like her so much."

- John Mulaney

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Georgetown University alumni•
"I would say it comes down to having your own life outside of Hollywood. It’s really just that simple. If you only live in the Hollywood world, you will be consumed by it. It will eat you alive. When you are finally spat out you will be someone who is wrecked emotionally, personally and financially. You have to have your own life outside this business. You have to have your own things that you dig, so that when you are told, “No,” and you will be told, “No” a million times, you will be OK and come out on your feet."

- Ted Raimi

• 0 likes• Actors from Detroit• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I never think about what another actor would do with the part. I only think about what I would like to do. In other words, I start very unconventionally. The actors that I typically don’t care for are the ones who are trying to be like other actors. I just try to be like myself. I start big and I let the director bring me down from there. I start with way too much usually. That way, the director can pair it down to the size he wants. Some actors prefer to start very, very small and let the director sort of mold them but, for me, it’s the other way around."

- Ted Raimi

• 0 likes• Actors from Detroit• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I would say, “Be yourself above all else.” Don’t try to be what Hollywood, your managers, your agents, friends, photographers or teachers want you to be. Be who you are. With that in mind, you will find that you will have a lot of hits and misses but you can always go home knowing who you are at the end of the day. That’s a rare thing in Hollywood. This town, though it appears it’s a dream factory and to some extent it is, produces a lot more bruised bananas than peaches, if you get my meaning."

- Ted Raimi

• 0 likes• Actors from Detroit• Comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"In medicine, especially emergency medicine, you have very little time to really understand what’s going on with somebody, the story about what lead them to this is what I look at. There’s a beginning, middle and end. It’s much more revealing and will often tell you more than tests will. The tests are just there to confirm it."

- Ivan Raimi

• 0 likes• Physicians from Detroit• Screenwriters from the United States•
"There are a lot of demons and supernatural forces happening in entertainment right now, but there aren’t a lot of regular guys who have a lot of faults who are going out and slugging it out with the demons and the monsters. You know, giving them a real slug-fest and that's what Ash does well."

- Ivan Raimi

• 0 likes• Physicians from Detroit• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I try not to wink at the audience too much or laugh at my own satire. Good B-movie camp has to be played deadly serious. Let the audience do the chuckling."

- Eric Forsberg

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"My biggest influence was my father, Rolf Forsberg, who was a successful independent filmmaker in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, doing mostly shorts, religious films, and eco-green-movies before they were cool. My friends and I would watch his films over and over again when they slept at my house. I got my first super 8mm camera when I was nine and I’ve been making movies ever since."

- Eric Forsberg

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"When you look at three hundred people, you’ll find some that just fit. It’s like a bell rings, “They’re perfect. That’s them!” Then once that happens, eighty-percent of communicating the world to them is achieved. They are now communicating that world to me. We’re now creating it together. I’m a very collaborative director. I bring them into the world by being excited. I try to give that to them and give them a tremendous amount of leeway to let them build up their characters."

- Eric Forsberg

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Movies are going to go away eventually. I just want to make sure that, when they do, they turn into something better."

- Eric Forsberg

• 0 likes• People from Chicago• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The creative community has a lot more ideas than the executive community feels comfortable with."

- Josh Pate

• 0 likes• People from North Carolina• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"We’ve been doing this for awhile, when you’ve been doing this a long time, you cross your fingers and hope for the best, but you never know. To find an audience that’s passionate, that’s as good as it gets."

- Jonas Pate

• 0 likes• People from North Carolina• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Producers from the United States•
"I’m sure everyone is different, but I believe the performance will always be stronger if you’re working with another actor."

- Yuri Lowenthal

• 0 likes• Actors from Ohio• Screenwriters from the United States• Voice actors•
"There is going to be an inescapable tension between – and I’m going to call them the oligarchy; the establishment, the monied classes, the one percent – and the rest of us and the rest of humanity. And without some strong institution like the medieval church, to intervene, people are just going to go out for themselves. And there were some economic theorists who believe that’s the best thing for society, and they cling to that."

- Carl Gottlieb

• 0 likes• Jews from the United States• Primetime Emmy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Actors from New York City• Comedians from the United States•
"I just happen to be someone who happens to like the fear to be created in my mind. That’s why I like the more minimalistic approach. It’s just a taste thing. I’m not as into the blood and guts."

- John Pogue

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Yale University alumni•
"I think the key to a great romcom is to not fight against the genre,” she explains. “The trend more recently has been to apologise, or be snarky, so it’s an anti-romcom.” Out comes that wide smile. “Just lean in and embrace the fact it’s a love story and it’s funny and it’s light. It can still be uber-smart and deal with zeitgeist issues."

- Lake Bell

• 0 likes• Actresses from New York City• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Jewish American actresses•
"My dream participation would be to make as much money as humanly possible for doing nothing whatsoever."

- Fred Dekker

• 0 likes• People from San Francisco• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"CGI is a wonderful tool but I believe it’s mostly mis-used. Or maybe more to the point: OVER-used. I truly believe we have a little chip in our head that subconsciously tells us when something we’re seeing isn’t real… and therein lies the danger of CGI."

- Fred Dekker

• 0 likes• People from San Francisco• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The thing that I learned from Night of the Creeps that went going into Monster Squad and anything else that I had done since then is to have a stopwatch and make sure that however long it takes to play the scene or the take, that we do a couple at different speeds and presumably faster. If you look at the Preston Sturges comedies of the forties or some of the great comic directors of those days or even Howard Hawks, where he had everybody talking over each other very quickly. I think that's a great litmus test because people will almost never blame you if your movie goes too quickly, but they will get their noses out of joint if it's too slow. So the lesson I learned on Creeps was pace. But there's times when it takes its time and that really, really works for it. Making movies is trying to catch lightning in a bottle and it's very, very tricky to do."

- Fred Dekker

• 0 likes• People from San Francisco• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I wrote Novitiate because I saw in a nun’s world a unique and profound way to explore the subject of the way women love. That is what remains at the heart of the story for me. … When I finished this movie, I had a new understanding of religion. I have now a deep sense of admiration and enduring empathy for nuns. Not to mention all the extraordinary sacrifices these women were willing to make, in the name of their love and faith."

- Maggie Betts

• 0 likes• African Americans• Film directors from the United States• People from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I was told they'd hired somebody for Leonardo and then they fired him. And then they hired another guy and then they fired him, too. So they said, "We're still looking for this guy to do the turtle." I thought, "What the hell does a turtle sound like?""

- Brian Tochi

• 0 likes• Actors from Los Angeles• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Journalists from the United States•
"We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!" Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws--everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"I did this one script for ' that turned down--said it was a piece of shit! I knew it was one of the best things I'd written, so I took it back and reworked it and at Four Star bought it as a pilot for '. Dick Powell was really a fine gentleman and the eagle behind Four Star's success; he helped me a great deal. I didn't direct the first Rifleman; did that. I just wrote it. I did direct four of them before I left, however. The first one I directed I also wrote, called "The Marshal." It was the episode that brought in as the reformed drunk who became the marshal--a part he played for five years."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"I walked from the series because Jules Levy and that group had taken over my initial concept and perverted it into pap. They wouldn't let Johnny grow up; they refused to let it be the story of a boy who grows to manhood learning what it's all about."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"The Losers was a funny show. We had and locked up for a series with it until Tom McDermott wouldn't pay Lee's price. Well, after the show continued to draw a large segment of the audience around the sixth time out, McDermott called Lee and raised the ante to something like a million dollars and Lee told him to go stick it up his ass! I've always liked Lee for that--it cost me a lot of money at the time but I would've done the same thing in Lee's place."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"Sam and I work well together. I would go to and from work with him, so we would have that extra time to talk with each other—that kind of thing is very unusual, but I think something comes of that proximity."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"Sam's like a fight trainer. He shapes you up, he psyches you, he draws everything out of you. He's subtle, though, yet baroque, and I want to get into that baroqueness. Like the other day, during a scene in which I was supposed to be answering the door and registering surprise. Well, it was the end of the day and I wasn't acting very surprised, so he smashes a beer bottle behind me, right out of camera range. I mean, Christ, I nearly jumped out of my skin. But he got what he wanted."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"[T]he story [...] was really more representative of how Sam thought than any picture except Ride the High Country. He liked to laugh at things, if no one was around to catch him at it."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"I said to him, "Well, I'm just trying to find out who Hildy is, and it was out in the open, in the western street, and he yelled at me, "She's you!" You know? Like, in such a way as to say, "You're the whore," you know? He was not very nice. And he did that to men to rile them, too. There have been many men who have done things to get even with Sam, because he had no tact."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"It would've been nicer if he didn't pose as he did, and sit behind sunglasses that have mirrors on them so that no one could see his eyes. Because he was such a liar, he was afraid to get caught, because if you look in someone's eyes deeply enough, you can tell they're lying. So he was afraid of that; he wouldn't let anyone see his eyes."

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"His hatred, his loneliness, whatever that he had, his angst, he could not let it go. He had to try to drown it in alcohol. But that's like pouring gasoline on a fire. But he just would not stop. And it was common sense that he should do that, so I'm not sure that he had common sense. He would make people mad and cause fights, and then run, hide; he wouldn't be there. He would, you know, take a punch here or there, but he was not a fighter. He was a little, bitty guy. You could deck him with one punch. I probably could have, you know?"

- Sam Peckinpah

• 0 likes• Film directors from California• Screenwriters from the United States• United States Marines• Actors from California•
"I'm gay in my art and straight in my life."

- James Franco

• 0 likes• Actors from California• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Yale University alumni•
"One thing that I was aware of was that, whatever I do as an Asian American actor, I should try my best to bring something positive to the image of an Asian American."

- Dustin Nguyen

• 0 likes• Vietnamese Americans• Immigrants to the United States• Actors from Vietnam• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Of course, it’s very nice. Because I’ve done this for a long time and just in life, I’ve learned to live with very little expectation. Then, you’re not let down. The more you expect, the more you’re going to be let down and disappointed. When everything comes together, it’s just a nice bonus. A lot of it has to do with trust because of who these people are. There’s an integrity behind it that I feel is genuine. I trust my own instincts. I saw the passion and the commitment they put into making sure that show is as good as it could be, in a respectful way, to Bruce Lee and the legacy that he left behind."

- Dustin Nguyen

• 0 likes• Vietnamese Americans• Immigrants to the United States• Actors from Vietnam• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I never set out to be an actor. I always knew that I wanted to direct and produce movies. I’m well aware that I was very lucky. My career started out with a bang and I’ve had incredible opportunities to do very good projects and work with wonderful people. I would be lying to say that I wasn’t aware of the success and the fame that it brought me and the cast members of 21 Jump Street. At the height of the show, we literally couldn’t go anywhere. We all enjoyed that, but I had enough sense to know that all of that would be gone, at some point. Nothing lasts forever. So, I continued to keep working in any way that I could, but I never really thought of the trajectory of what kind of career I was going to have, and certainly not where I ended up today."

- Dustin Nguyen

• 0 likes• Vietnamese Americans• Immigrants to the United States• Actors from Vietnam• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"So whatever decision you make, you're going to be able to find stories or signs to say 'I did the right thing,' because we have to believe we did the right thing in order to survive."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think people have this romanticism of the homeland, and that’s just not the reality for me. Every time I go back to China, I feel more American than ever, so it’s this question of, ‘Well, where is home?’ We’re always searching for it and never fully fitting in."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"It’s so much easier to tell a fish-out-of-water story when the person is blond and blue-eyed going to an Asian country, for example. But what is it like when you look the same as those people, and you’re expected to fit in? How do you put that interiority on screen?"

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"People are always asking me about the importance of representation and identity in relation to making The Farewell and of course those things are really important to me – thinking about my identity and exploring my identity in the west. But I would love it if men – white men – were also asked the same questions as me. They should be asked these questions so they can be more conscientious about how they’re representing people, how they’re not representing people, and aware of their own blind spots."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"In my family, and especially when I go back to China, it's always like, prepare your stomach, because it's the way that they express love."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Sometimes America is so great because it brings all of us together, but sometimes it can be so limiting because it puts labels on things."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Americans always talk about family love being unconditional, and I realized that I didn't feel that way."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"We all have different aspects of ourselves, and who we are to different people in our lives, at different stages of our lives."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"There have been moments where I laughed at my own family's culture, though it's hard to separate out whether something funny is cultural, or just my grandma specifically."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"There's so little representation of people who look like me behind the camera that it makes you want to say yes to any opportunity out of desperation. It puts you in a situation where you can't make your best work. Diversity for cheap."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I can't speak for everybody, and I don't want to say it for an entire culture, but for me, coming from an immigrant family, it's very difficult to go find your voice, which requires a lot of failure."

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The questions I want to ask will revolve around humans, connection, relationships, family, and stories - what are the stories we tell ourselves and each other?"

- Lulu Wang

• 0 likes• Chinese Americans• Women from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film directors from China• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Good drama (and comedy) often comes from the simple act of placing characters in a situation that is not usual nor comfortable for them."

- Lynn Shelton

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Ohio•
"My fascination is with relationships at their most microcosmic. The more epic, the more uninteresting the film-making becomes. It becomes about getting the perfect crane shot."

- Lynn Shelton

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Ohio•
"I want my movies to feel like you’re paratrooping into somebody’s life."

- Lynn Shelton

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Ohio•
"The genesis of the vast majority of my films is an actor as a muse that I want to work with. Humpday was Mark Duplass, Outside In was his brother, Jay Duplass, this movie was Marc Maron, who I’ve been really wanting to make a movie with for three and a half years. Then there’s other things, like a territory I want to explore or an element I want to return to, like improvisation, which I haven’t done since Your Sister’s Sister."

- Lynn Shelton

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Ohio•
"As a filmmaker, I really am most interested in humans and their deep desire to connect to each other. How do they get through their own lives? Where have I come and where am I now? And where do I want to go from here? It’s all of those humanistic questions."

- Lynn Shelton

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Film editors• Actresses from Ohio•
"He’s a person, which is the whole point of this movie. He’s not just some like floating demon slayer, and it’s a really tricky balance…He’s someone who clearly has a lot of pain, and that’s something I find really interesting about him as a character."

- Nia DaCosta

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Women from the United States•
"I love horror and I felt like I had a really good idea about how to make something scary, but also I’m very measured, especially with a story like this, about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate."

- Nia DaCosta

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Women from the United States•
"I would have hated getting the question, ‘Isn’t it so timely right now, with all these deaths going on?’ That’s not why we made it. But I think it will happen again – a summer like last summer. I think that the story we’re telling was about that: the fact that it’s cyclical. It could come out next year, it could come out any time and still be relevant."

- Nia DaCosta

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Women from the United States•
"It’s not necessarily overtly racist, but it is shocking the way people have talked to me in my position as a director. People who work for me. Especially on a movie like this, where Jordan was the only other person of colour at the level of decision-making on the movie. And that’s unacceptable, frankly."

- Nia DaCosta

• 0 likes• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Women from the United States•
"I came of age for film, at a time when the sexism was pretty strong. And although I could get work as a Writer, I couldn’t get work as a Director at all. And I had the experience of watching young men who had made shorts as I had, prize winning shorts, as I had, moving on to directing films and I couldn’t do it. And, and my husband, Ray [Ray Silver], was… became angry, and he said, “You know, maybe you can do it, maybe you can’t, but everybody should have a chance to try for the brass ring.”"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"My own experience with my films has been that the more I’m left alone, the better I do. It isn’t that I think I’m smarter than anyone, or anything like that. It’s just that whatever my instincts are, it’s better for me to be able to put those into play in my own work."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I don’t think too many people had what I had, a husband who believed in me and who wanted to help me. (discussing the support and encouragement she received at the start of her film career)"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"So many directors that I admire do things in two takes, like Lumet, and then there are directors like Arthur Penn, who did 40 takes. Whatever works for you, but I like to get it, and once I’ve got it move on. I don’t keep doing it to see if anything else will come. I haven’t ever had where I’ve had so much time or money where I would have had the time to do 40 takes. (as an answer to if she has a preferance to do a minimum number of takes)"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I really love being the person who in the end gets to make the decisions and have it become the way you want it to be and that urge is an overpowering urge that I have that makes me want to make films."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"It's a human truth that romantic fantasies are very hard to let go of and while it would be very nice to say Izzy, observing the difference between the two men realize that immediately that Sam was the better choice. I mean maybe you know maybe you work more rationally than than Izzy I don't know. But I mean the thing is that that you don't always do what's good for you, you know you don't always do what's right for you and sometimes you have to grow past it or go through something in order to reject it. (discussing the lead character's decision making in the film Crossing Delancey)"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Abstract notions of feminism never interested Joan; specific women and their stories did. Yet without setting out to do so, Joan Silver influenced generations of women to come. She was a trail-blazer, a risk-taker, a champion of other women directors. And always as quietly confident as she was the day I met her some fifty years ago."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Joan Micklin Silver was one of the most courageous artists I ever knew. She knew she could prevail at a time when women were not being taken seriously as film directors. We have all been deprived of seeing so many many other great movies that Joan was ready and prepared to give us."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"The pathbreaking movie director Joan Micklin Silver got to have a career that almost no woman was allowed to have, and did not get to have the career that she deserved. Such is the paradox of the pioneer: You get to go where very few have gone before, but when you get there, there’s nobody to pull you up or push you ahead. You make your own way, and withstand the indifference, the hostility, the condescension, and the people who treat you as a curiosity or a slightly troubling anomaly."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Hollywood, of course, expected women to be collaborative, but had no intention of rewarding them for it. So she stayed independent. (Hollywood's ignorance of Joan Micklin Silver's talents and ambition)"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"We were so young and had never produced anything, and Joan was infinitely patient and remarkably assured on the set. We learned so much about movies from her. And she really knew how to talk to actors. John [Heard] could be tricky — he was moody and had a tough reputation. But he never gave her a moment of trouble. (memories of the production of Chilly Scenes of Winter)"

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Great American filmmaker not nearly revered enough, I think she should be talked about alongside John Cassavetes as people who really moved the needle for American Indie Cinema, like after World War II and before Sundance."

- Joan Micklin Silver

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Women from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Comedy is a lot harder to do if you don’t go to the mean place. The cheapest laugh you can get is an insult or snarky comment, so if you take that off the table you have to write smarter."

- Dan Povenmire

• 0 likes• Actors from San Diego• Animators• Producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Voice actors•
"You don’t survive as a screenwriter-for-hire if you’re not willing to incorporate other people’s ideas or at least be willing to consider them. What I’ve found is that other people have really good ideas, which make you look better. It’s part of the process. At all stages of production, including pre- and post-, your film is going to change because it’s being shaped by all these people and ideas."

- Cyrus Nowrasteh

• 0 likes• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Christians• People from Colorado•
"You hear some comics that used to play colleges all the time. They don’t want to do that any more, because there’s no room for any kind of daring comedy. Everybody’s gonna be pissed off about something. And that’s… a drag."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Actors talk about a love of craft and contributing to artistic welfare. But, really, I think [the desire to act] came for me from wanting more attention from my parents."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"Over the last 10 years, I never made a very concerted effort to mix it up. I just wanted to work on things that I liked. But I think I was feeling some fatigue over that and wanted to try something different."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I also think there’s something about the Midwest. The people that I grew up with in the Midwest — there’s something hardwired in them that they just don’t take themselves too seriously. They don’t get too big for their britches."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I don’t have any sort of grand statement to make, to anybody. I don’t want people to know that much about me, really. I don’t have much of an interest in being an open book."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I don’t come from a family of actors, I didn’t grow up around it and so when I go to Los Angeles for work, or to a premiere, I like it because it feels like I’m just popping in."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I figured early on [acting] was what I wanted to do for a job. And I certainly hoped it would work out, and that I would be playing lots of different parts. But I don't think I anticipated being an ant!"

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"I call myself an action figure in real life and a superhero in fake life."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"There’s nothing sexy about nice; there’s nothing alluring or intriguing. And yet, I really love it when people are nice. Because honestly, I just think life is so hard. There are so many things that can get you down—that are so frustrating and so maddening. As cornball as it sounds, kindness is a thing that can defuse it a little bit. Kindness and laughs."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"When you’re playing a part you’re not just thinking about genre. ‘Oh this part is gonna be action then drama and I’m gonna tell some jokes and be funny…’ I don’t compartmentalise it like that."

- Paul Rudd

• 0 likes• Actors from New Jersey• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Jews from the United States•
"The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude but fast in sinking the unfit."

- Felix Riesenberg

• 0 likes• Sailors• Historians from the United States• Memoirists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Non-fiction authors from the United States•
"From a cinema major’s perspective, philosophically, theoretically it’s easier for people to imprint on that character what they think they’re feeling. I don’t know why, but it seems easier for kids to identify with someone like Ferb, or Perry, when they say nothing."

- Jeff "Swampy" Marsh

• 0 likes• Animators• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"There was something wonderful about being able to look up and see what that physical representation was going to look like. It is one of the things that I miss, now that we’re in a much more digital age."

- Jeff "Swampy" Marsh

• 0 likes• Animators• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I first made contact with Bill on November 18, 1999- the night before my fourth and final audition for the miniseries. It was a gig I wanted more than anything in my life and I was hoping that a last-minute call would give me some kind of good luck- some edge that would make the difference. I had read the book a few months before our first chat and had spent every waking moment since becoming an expert on all things Easy Company and all things Guarnere. The more I learned about him the more superhuman he became to me. From his rough-and-tumble childhood on the streets of Depression-era South Philly to his losing a leg in Bastogne to save the life of his friend- it all added up to a man unlike any other I had ever known. A hero. A legend, and I needed to hear his voice to make him "real" to me."

- Frank John Hughes

• 0 likes• Actors from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties."

- Ann Lewis

• 0 likes• Political authors• Democratic Party (United States) politicians• Screenwriters from the United States• United States federal government officials• Non-fiction authors from the United States•
"I would go to where [famous comedians] were, with an enormous tape recorder from the AV squad, and I would lie and say it was a real radio station. And when I got there, a child … had just shown up, and they would realize they got duped. But, they would talk to me anyway because they were really nice. And I would just say to Seinfeld, "How do you write a joke?" And I would force him to walk me through it. Or, I interviewed Harold Ramis: "How do you write a movie?" And those interviews changed my life because they really told me. It was my college. I had my college [education] in junior [year] of high school. I was just so obsessed, so I thought, "I'm gonna try to interview every original writer from Saturday Night Live. So, I interviewed Al Franken and Tom Davis and—. … What would happen is someone would be nice—like Alan Zweibel. I'd interview him and he would take out the phonebook and say, "I'm gonna hook you up with this person," and he would start giving me all the phone numbers. And I was obsessive. I was always trying to get Andy Kaufman, but … at the time he was always down south wrestling. And I would call his management office and they'd say, "We don't even know where he is.""

- Judd Apatow

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Actors from New York City• Screenwriters from the United States• Producers from the United States• Comedians from New York City•
"People make mistakes, and from mistakes they should be allowed time to recover."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"We’re putting a group of men together that are talented enough and aren't afraid to make fun of themselves."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Avoid the simple problems, because they become the big problems."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"When you start doing it for the perceptions of others, you’re never going to win. Your biggest believer in what you do should be you."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"I feel that in today’s time, what people are most selfish with is information. Nobody wants to give information. You got to ask for it. If you ask for it, then, “All right, maybe, maybe I’ll tell you some stuff”, but it’s a search and find."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Understanding that we’re in control and that, at the end of the day, it’s you against you. If you are putting yourself in a position to be the best version of yourself, then it means you’re understanding yourself. And understanding yourself means that life isn’t perfect and it’s never gonna be perfect, but it’s about progression."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"When God talks, you got to listen, and I swear life is funny. Because some of the craziest things that happen to you end up being the things that you needed most. And in this case, I honestly feel like God basically told me to sit down."

- Kevin Hart

• 0 likes• Actors from Philadelphia• Stand-up comedians from the United States• African Americans• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"What they need to do is to look more closely at the fundamentals of American life, sympathetically, not with intent to "commit a message.""

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"If Americans don't give up their prejudices because of false notions of religious or racial or national superiority, then, by golly, they're going to have to give them up because the other fellows are getting the guns."

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Jimmy "Mr. Cupid" O'Brien: Come on, step on it, Jefferson! We're an hour late for our deliveries now. Thomas H. Jefferson: Aw, have a heart, Mr. Cupid. Look at that speed meter. Jimmy: What're you worried about? Jefferson: About goin' to my own funeral. [Siren heard.] Mm mm. What'd I tell you? Here come the cops. Jimmy: Now listen! You keep quiet. I'll get out of this. Jefferson: You wouldn't be in it if you would go where the flowers was goin', instead of stoppin' where they ain't."

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Jefferson: But Mr. Cupid: if you go through that book, lookin' all through them Joneses, we're gonna be late. And we gonna get another traffic ticket, and... Jimmy: Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Don't you want to get a boy friend for a nice girl like Susie? Jefferson: Yeah. And I wanna keep a job for a nice boy like Jefferson."

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Jimmy: This is awful! It's terrible! Hey, Jefferson! [Shouting] Hey! Hey. Jefferson: What's the matter? Jimmy: I made a mistake! Jefferson: Which one? Jimmy: Well... according to this, Morgan isn't a G-man! Jefferson: How can you tell? Well, this claims he's a liar. Jefferson: How does that prove he ain't no G-man?"

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Jimmy: Hey, Callahan! Callahan: Hey, Cupid, who sent you down here? Jimmy: Never mind the smart cracks; something important has happened. Callahan: Yeah? Jimmy: Yeah, I... I've decided maybe I was wrong about you. Callahan: So what? Jimmy: Well... so how do you spell your name?, Callahan: My name? C, A, double L, A, H, A, N. Why? Jimmy: Mm hmm. Look... would you mind writin' it for me? Callahan: Writing it? Jimmy: Yeah. Callahan: [Signs.] What's the gag? Jimmy: Well, if this proves you're all right, you're gonna get Susie. Callahan: Hey, are you crazy? Jimmy: No, no! No, I'm a graphologist; now be quiet."

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
""I don't like the word tolerance. It sounds stuck up". It was a little old lady speaking, very little and quite old. Her name was Kitty, and she was my mother. "There ain't any respect in tolerating," she continued, the blue of her eyes grown darker with indignation. "That's just putting up with them, like with bad plumbing when you can't afford to move..." [...] She did not "tolerate" the Negro or the Asiatic, the Protestant or the Jew, despite their racial or religious difference. Instead, she respected every human being equally, because she thought Thomas Jefferson had meant every word of the Declaration. pp. 1, 3"

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"In the spacious mansions of San Francisco's Nob Hill a Chinese cook was a must. The first thing the nouveau riche did as they tried to scramble up the ladder of society was to jingle gold pieces in the ears of a Lee or a Wong to lure him into their newly furnished houses. But the Chinese themselves had a social position only slightly above that of the rodents who sometimes threatened the fine mahogany wainscoting of their employers' houses. They were commonly referred to as "Chinks," with or without accompanying epithet, except by the gentler of tongue, who invariably spoke of a Chinese as "John Chinaman." pp. 5–6"

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Gaiety and God were closely connected in my mother's mind. Going to church on Sunday was not enough. Having fun was necessary, if the worship of God were to be complete. "We should enjoy ourselves, especially on Sunday, to show Him how happy we are on His day. If we can't help having a long face once in a while, then for heaven's sake let's have it on a week day." p. 103"

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Usually no one sees the city of his birth until he leaves and then returns to it with new eyes, but, ridiculously proud of my brand-new press badge, I was discovering San Francisco as though it were a strange city. I began to realize the city's many hills, as if they had been erected only last month. You go up and down those hills by cable car or auto, and a dozen times a day you catch your breath in the suddenness of beautiful vistas—water, ships, wooded hills across the bay . . . and sea gulls, no matter where the neighborhood, never once letting you forget the nearness of the ocean. They really dominated the Embarcadero, that long stretch of San Francisco's beautiful harbor. On one side were brine-encrusted piers, their pilings creaking against the sides of ships with exciting cargoes from all parts of the world. Across the way were shabby marine stores, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, bedraggled flophouses, and seedy bars. The constant calling of the sea gulls often had to compete with the sirens of police cars. pp. 112–113"

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Next week the Independent and Press will bring you a new column published for the first time anywhere [...] It will be titled "Mary McCarthy's Column." Anything more pretentious would offend Mary Eunice McCarthy."

- Mary Eunice McCarthy

• 0 likes• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women authors from the United States• Journalists from San Francisco• Women born in the 19th century•
"Because people would talk about grief, oftentimes saying, ‘y’all got hit with a wave.’ But the grief can carry you or you can feel like you’re drowning in it."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"You don’t know what your life is going to bring. You don’t know what’s going to happen."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"As filmmakers, you'll see actors working on a movie. Next thing you know, they're dating. Just because it's long hours, you're remote on location, and you end up becoming close with these people. You got no other choice but to. Sometimes that can get complicated."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"People are prisoners of their own perspectives."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"It was a priority for us that we make the film something that could work for audiences as a piece of filmmaking, as a piece of cinema, as a piece of entertainment."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"I definitely want to push myself. I definitely want to be on the outside edge of what’s comfortable for me creatively, on the outside edge of what I’ve done before. I want to be pushing my own boundaries, but I try not to compare my films to my other films because I think that’s probably not a healthy way to look at it."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Progress comes in ebbs and flows. You’ve got to put your foot on the gas when it comes … or things can go back to where they were."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"For me, the pressure's always been there, 'cause I'm in a career that's unexpected, in terms of where I'm from and what I look like, you know, how old I am. So I'll always feel pressure. I'll always feel like I'm up against odds that are kind of insurmountable and, 'Man, if I don't get this right, I might not ever work in this town again.' But you kind of got to tune that stuff out."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"For one, like, this medium of superhero films and this blockbuster medium, it's just myth-making but on terms that are current. That's why these movies make a lot money. That's why people talk about them, you know what I mean, people dress up as them."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"You look at any society in any period of time, they had their version of how they did their myth-making. Whether it was vaudeville, whether it was plays, whether it was on the plains of Africa ... Right now, it's these big, huge, large-canvas films."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Africa's a continent that's known for its resources, you know. It's very rich in terms of any kind of resource that you can get out of the ground that has value. You're going to find it in abundance somewhere on that continent, whether it's oil, whether it's rubber, whether it's gems or precious metals. It led to colonization and exploitation. It led to borders being drawn, not by the people who are from there, you know. And it led to the mental horrors of colonization, which comes with being told that you're less than, and not worthy of, and losing your language — losing your heritage, and the cousin of colonization, which is a very scary relative of it, is the theft of bodies, is what happened to my ancestors."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"You know, I just want to make films that resonate with me, that are interesting to me, that deal with themes that I'm passionate about."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"The superhero field is a field where there’s not a lot of representation. It’s traditionally white male, but the fans look like the world. So, naturally, people are going to yearn to see someone flying around doing these incredible things that looks like them. It’s an incredible opportunity, but that’s what keeps me up at night – for better and for worse."

- Ryan Coogler

• 0 likes• African Americans• People from Oakland• Film directors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"As an actress, it’s a dream come true role. You run the gamut of human emotions with each incarnation of the story. She’s an authentic character and I have so much fun playing her."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I put on a few pounds. I also put on some breasts and a baby bump. Bridget is a perfectly normal weight and I’ve never understood why it matters so much."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I had a lot of promises that I made to myself, years ago, about things that I wanted to learn and try."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"My imperfections always surface at the most inopportune time. Usually on live TV, in an interview situation, and always on a red carpet. There’s always something happening, but that’s life. You just have to move forward."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"You cannot be a good storyteller if you don’t have life experiences, and you can’t relate to people."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I know that great things happen when this team gets together, and I was optimistic about doing a very entertaining film."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"Not that it's anyone's business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"Celebrity is a different job than what I’m interested in. I like the collaborative, creative experience. It’s a blue-collar job, you know? Getting together with a group of people where we’re all solving problems together, and everybody does their thing. They’re all at the top of their game, and everyone is giving it their all."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I had made so many promises to myself about things that I wanted to explore, things I wanted to try, and how I would like to grow as a person that I had made no time for. And I thought, 'That's enough."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"Seeing all the people back in character was quite a moving experience. I think Renée is better in the role now than she’s ever been and that’s saying something. It was like watching close-up magic. It was a master class."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"And Renee's taught me a lot of that too. She's a very connected person. She thinks having a good time is renting a U-Haul and taking furniture to Texas. She's real in that way and I absolutely love it."

- Renée Zellweger

• 0 likes• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Actresses from Texas• Academy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)•
"I can’t tell you how encouraging a thing like this is. The first film that I was ever in was in 1915, and here we are, and it’s 1969. Actually, I don’t know why it took me so long, though I don’t think, you know, that I’m backward. Anyway, thank you Bill, thank you Bob, thank you Roman and thank you Mia, and thank all of you who voted for me."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Work on yourself. Believe in yourself. Show up! Support others! The bounty of the world will open up for you."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"The biggest limitations are the ones we place on ourselves, and opportunities rise up to meet the unique offerings of people."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"I wipe away all the unpleasantness of the day, of the people, of the city, whatever. We have it in our power to overcome assholes, and I think we have them thrown into our path to see if we have the chops to handle them."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"I was amazed the way Garson could take these teams and make me want to see their pictures all over again."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Don't be helpless, don't give up, don't kill yourself, don't look for trouble. Stuff gets in your way, kick it under the rug. Stay well, stay with it, make it come out..."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Her strength was always tremendous, tremendous theatrical expertise. She knew more about the theater than anybody that I ever encountered in my life. And she, being a very great actress, could recognize the strengths and the weaknesses in a role, so that she wouldn't allow a part in any of our films to be anything less than a wonderful acting part."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Kanin, Ruth's husband describe her role as an actress in 1837."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Ruth exulted in life, Her blazing professionalism and generosity of spirit made it obvious to me that we had in our midst one of the greatest of them all."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"Her warmth and humanity shone like the first patch of sun on a dark and wintry day, The world will be a colder place without her enthusiastic, elegant and adorable countenance."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"At this time it's being considered as a natural death,she was always around town, She always stopped and talked to people. She was very pleasant."

- Ruth Gordon

• 0 likes• Actresses from Massachusetts• Academy Award winners• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Women born in the 19th century•
"We stumble around the massive solemnity of this temple mountain, which offers not so much solace or refuge as It does awe and even a shiver of atavistic fear at the omniscience of its precision. It is a place of power, once ruled by Hindu devarajas, under whose totality religious art and sculpture reflect Shiva and Vishnu ...."

- Rudy Wurlitzer

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Cincinnati•
"One huge bas relief in particular stuns us with its fluid elegance in depicting the Hindu creation myth, "churning the sea of milk" In a union between gods and demons, the giant serpent Vasuki is pulled back and forth between the monkey god, Hanuman, and a line of demons. Vasuki who has wrapped himself around Mount Mandara, is supported by a giant turtle in the Sea of Milk, the ocean of immortality. As Vishnu overseas this diville rhythm of opposites, the gods and demons rotate the mountain and chum the sea into foam, releasing a seminal fluid which creates a divine ambrosia, or amrita, the essence of elixir of life. Much of the bas-relief has faded from centuries of worshippers rubbing their hands over the figures, but overall it is still exquisitely defined."

- Rudy Wurlitzer

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Cincinnati•
"Angkor wat has overpowered as much as inspired me. It is as if I've trapped myself my wishing for relief, for a transcendent moment, or even, on a more banal level, a catalyst that would revive our sagging energies. The magnificence of the sheer mass of Angkor Wat, the weight and abundance of imagery has become oppressive. I am disoriented by so much visual grandeur."

- Rudy Wurlitzer

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from Cincinnati•
"I was at the movies yesterday, and before the movie started they had this long ad where they were trying to say … "Don't download things illegally" et cetera. And … they were like, "You wouldn't steal a purse, would you? You wouldn't think of stealing a car." And I was thinking about it … and I was like, "You know what? I would steal a car if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then 30 seconds later I own the car." And, like, I would steal a car if … [even though I stole] the car, the person who owned the car got to keep the car. And I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"When you’re starting out [as a television writer], mostly it’s terrifying because you think you could get fired and then never get hired again. If you see some of the statistics for women of color on writing staffs, you’ll see that even if there’s parity, it’s so hard to get promoted and stay on a show. A whopping majority of upper-level writers are still white men. You see a lot of people of color in the younger ranks, but it’s hard to move up."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I think there’s been a tendency for people to conflate my characters with my personality. … I wrote 24 episodes of The Office. That’s more than any other person on The Office, but no one can really picture me sitting and doing the hard work of writing the episodes."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I could really relate to &lsqb;Never Have I Ever&rsqb;, more than anything else that I’ve ever written. I was personally proud of it, but didn’t know how it would be received. And to this day, I think it’s my biggest success in terms of how many people it reached and how popular it was on Netflix. I learned a lesson from it, which is not to be cynical about the public."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I'm going to gently assume that if you're reading this book, you are a little bit of a nerd, or perhaps you're a man whose nerd girlfriend is taking a long time in the bathroom and you can't figure out how to turn on her television."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I’m surprised when I remember that, physically, I resemble most women in this country. In the United States, a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches and a size 10 is probably more common than virtually any other body type. But somehow when she is on-screen it’s shocking to people, almost as shocking as seeing a married couple on TV where the man and woman are roughly the same age."

- Mindy Kaling

• 0 likes• Stand-up comedians from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Television producers• Producers from the United States•
"I love raccoons. I had a raccoon figurine collection as a kid, and I now have two movies with 'Ranger Rick' jokes in them. I love 'em. They come in my backyard all the time, and we just stare at each other like a couple of idiots."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I think of the Avengers as The Beatles, and the Guardians are the Rolling Stones. That is really how I feel about the groups."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I like Jason Statham movies, like The Transporter or whatever. I watch them all the time when they come on TV. Then I saw 'Crank,' and I couldn't believe how awesome it was."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The Flash resets many things, not all things. Some characters remain the same, some do not ."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Each story should be enjoyed on its own merits, without relying on its connection to a larger universe, adding that shared universes should enhance individual stories, not the other way around."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind."

- James Gunn

• 0 likes• Actors from St. Louis• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. "If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different- you underscore your shared humanity," she told me. "I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?""

- Sebastian Junger

• 0 likes• Journalists from Massachusetts• Historians from Massachusetts• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Atheists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America's ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively- that should be encouraged- but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what the politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn't, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves."

- Sebastian Junger

• 0 likes• Journalists from Massachusetts• Historians from Massachusetts• Non-fiction authors from the United States• Atheists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I’ve been doing "Breakfast Thoughts", and I guess my Breakfast Thought at the moment is, uh, is "the moment." Every person who is seeing me now — some are seeing me within months of my saying this, some are likely to see this years after I have said this, but whenever all of you are seeing it — that will be the moment you’re seeing it — as this is the moment I’m saying it. And what that means to me is: living in the moment. The moment between past and present, or present and past. The moment between after and next, the hammock in the middle of after and next. The moment. Treasure it. Use it with love."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"Well, I made it. I am 100 years old today. I wake up every morning grateful to be alive. Reaching my own personal centennial is cause for a bit of reflection on my first century — and on what the next century will bring for the people and country I love. To be honest, I’m a bit worried that I may be in better shape than our democracy is."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"I was deeply troubled by the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — by supporters of former President Donald Trump attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Those concerns have only grown with every revelation about just how far Mr. Trump was willing to go to stay in office after being rejected by voters — and about his ongoing efforts to install loyalists in positions with the power to sway future elections."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly. As a young man, I dropped out of college when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. I flew more than 50 missions in a B-17 bomber to defeat Fascism consuming Europe. I am a flag-waving believer in truth, justice and the American way, and I don’t understand how so many people who call themselves patriots can support efforts to undermine our democracy and our Constitution. It is alarming. At the same time, I have been moved by the courage of the handful of conservative Republican lawmakers, lawyers and former White House staffers who resisted Mr. Trump’s bullying. They give me hope that Americans can find unexpected common ground with friends and family whose politics differ but who are not willing to sacrifice core democratic principles."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"For all his faults, Archie loved his country and he loved his family, even when they called him out on his ignorance and bigotries. If Archie had been around 50 years later, he probably would have watched Fox News. He probably would have been a Trump voter. But I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him. I hope that the resolve shown by Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and their commitment to exposing the truth, would have won his respect."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"It is remarkable to consider that television — the medium for which I am most well-known — did not even exist when I was born, in 1922. The internet came along decades later, and then social media. We have seen that each of these technologies can be put to destructive use — spreading lies, sowing hatred and creating the conditions for authoritarianism to take root. But that is not the whole story. Innovative technologies create new ways for us to express ourselves, and, I hope, will allow humanity to learn more about itself and better understand one another’s ideas, failures and achievements."

- Norman Lear

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"I often feel disheartened by the direction that our politics, courts and culture are taking. But I do not lose faith in our country or its future. I remind myself how far we have come."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"Reaching this birthday with my health and wits mostly intact is a privilege. Approaching it with loving family, friends and creative collaborators to share my days has filled me with a gratitude I can hardly express. This is our century, dear reader, yours and mine. Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future."

- Norman Lear

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Jews from the United States• Film producers from the United States• People from New Haven•
"Civilization marches hand in hand with syphilis."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"All the Dracula films I've seen are literally bland compared to what Bram Stoker wrote in C.E.1897."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Stoker is the boring and inflexible director of the Lyceum Theatre. He writes an exceptionally erotic, oral and feverish tale that is avoided like the plague. So I would tell people to read it. Nobody reads the book in this town."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"The real historical Dracula was a knight who swore to protect the cross and church in C.E.1400. A charismatic hero for his people. He later turned into a bloodthirsty monster."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Despite the character's darkness, Gary invested... Dracula was not simply to be feared, but also to be loved."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"Fred Saberhagen and James V. Hart, Bram Stoker's Dracula, translated by Bruno Amato, Sperling & Kupfer Editori S.p.A., C.E.1993."

- James V. Hart

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Authors from the United States• Film producers from the United States•
"As much as he’s done for freedom of speech or whatever, he really doesn’t like what I’m doing."

- Joanna Angel

• 0 likes• Pornographic film actresses from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Businesspeople from the United States•
"I was raised to have great parents, and I was raised to believe that I had power, as big or small as it was. It was there and it was to be utilized. That’s something that I want a lot of women to get the opportunity to feel."

- Shonda Rhimes

• 0 likes• African Americans• Television producers• Screenwriters from the United States• Women born in the 1970s•
"The normality of the world we live in is completely insane. Okay? Now, what are you going to do? All of you have to make a living, so you have to get a job. I would say you don't have to do that. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to get a job. You don't have to earn that money. You can do something else -- if you wish. If you're willing not to have security. If you're willing to work with other people. If you're willing to take that beautiful Zen statement: leap and your net will appear."

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"When Koyaanisqatsi came out in 1982 (it was begun in 1975), this film taught me to look at the root of the future. Bob Dylan's song "Blowing in the Wind" comes to mind. Our future is blowing in the wind. You can see it in the tense I've created for my films, "the future present", or the rooted future. What we saw in Koyaanisqatsi almost 300 years ago, is even more coming true now because of the rooted future we live in. If you want to change things, I suggest you say no to the rooted future and create a future for yourself. We have a choice to change what's happening."

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"I call the films I make experiental. If this doesn't sound too weird, I look at the films I've been involved in as my children. When they're born, then they take on a life of their own. To try and remake your child is not a very good idea. What advice would I give to you? Whatever you're interested in, whatever you can do, do it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. (That's a paraphrase of a Goethe quote)"

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"The technology we have, is probably the most violent act against the planet that we can conceive of, more than the wars on the battlefield. The price we pay for technological happiness is bringing the planet to our knees. It's not something we use, it's as ubiquitous as the air we breathe."

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"What is patriotism other than mysticism? The sadness and the danger, of course, is that we have become totally dependent on mass society for life itself. It’s not as if we have much choice. What can we do? These concepts are unutterable. They’re now beyond the pale of language. This is partly why I have used Hopi, a non-literate language, to name my films."

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"I have a lot of admiration for the director [Godfrey Reggio] because he knew how to give not just pretty pictures or images but was able, through a play of images, to give a critique of the modem world that is very close to my own. But it's rather amusing to consider how differently different people can interpret this film. My wife, for example interpreted it as the story of the development of the world and its progression -- as a presentation of the creation of the world moving along into, very probably, an apocalypse. But one of my friends had a completely opposite reaction to the film. He thought that in the beginning it presented chaos, then moved after that into showing the progressive development of order. So you can see that the interpretation of images is very difficult."

- Godfrey Reggio

• 0 likes• Artists from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• People from New Orleans• Film directors from the United States•
"When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it...Nobody in the world cares if it doesn’t exist. You have to either believe in this fiction hard enough for it to become real, or you don’t, and it won’t."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"When you’re 16, there are qualities you wish you didn’t have, and then when you’re 30 you’re like, ‘Thank god I have that otherwise I’d be living less vividly’. You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"“The process of making it was just joy,” said Gerwig. “I don’t know if it was the pink or the music but it was just infectious.” Yet the most gratifying aspect, she said, was seeing strangers watch the film and realising that “the song that’s in my heart is in other people’s hearts”."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"The kind of amazing thing is that Barbie went to the moon before women had the ability to get credit cards."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"[Puberty is] a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too."

- Greta Gerwig

• 0 likes• People from Sacramento• Actresses from California• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States•
"We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"They threw me off the hay truck about noon."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Just you and me and the road."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"We're the friendliest enemies that ever were."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?""Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Restaurant, hey. That's what I've got. Whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.""It's a date."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this ' of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"A woman is a funny animal."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"... Walter, the time has come.""What do you mean, Phyllis?""For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"There’s a shark. Following the ship."I tried not to look, but couldn’t help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs."Walter, we’ll have to wait. Till the moon comes up.""I guess we better have a moon.""I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"When she tired, I loosened up a little, to let her blow. Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio , but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"If you have to do it, you can do it."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"The hand that holds the money cracks the whip."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"Let's get stinko."

- James M. Cain

• 0 likes• Journalists from Maryland• Screenwriters from the United States• Playwrights from the United States• Edgar Award winners• Novelists from Maryland•
"To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do."

- Evan Hunter

• 0 likes• Novelists from the United States• Short story writers from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Mystery authors• Memoirists from the United States•
"They'd taught him how to milk cows, and now they expected him to tame lions."

- Evan Hunter

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"A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week."

- Evan Hunter

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"He sees death in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars."

- Evan Hunter

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"He sees death in the prostitutes who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives 50 times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations."

- Evan Hunter

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"He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear. And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands."

- Evan Hunter

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"What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?"

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all."

- Jim Thompson (writer)

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"There has been no attempt made in this series to be inspirational. War has not been painted as a delightful or glorious experience, but simply and straightforwardly as the cold, grim, scientific business that it is."

- Edmund H. North

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"In those hours and days that followed Pearl Harbor the city of Washington was afflicted with jitters. Some people who knew the extent of the damage that the Japs had inflicted, were talking darkly of disaster. They were talking of the imminence of grave danger to our country—even of the possibility of Japanese invasion of our West Coast, or of Nazi raids on our East Coast. I didn’t know how real or how valid these fears might be. But—when I went into the presence of the president himself—I heard no talk of "disaster," no jitters. I knew that I was back in America. The president loved those ships that were hit at Pearl Harbor. When they were hit, it was as if the Japs had hit his own family. But he knew—he knew with all the confidence of a loyal American—he knew that no Japs and no Nazis—nor all the Japs and all the Nazis put together—could ever deliver a knockout blow against this country. He knew—better, perhaps, than any man who ever lived—he knew what Americans are and what Americans can do. And in those hours and days, after Pearl Harbor, the president would sit back and lean back in his chair, in his oval study up there on the second floor of the White House, and he stated very clearly and very simply what he thought our military strategy in this war ought to be. He completely rejected a defensive policy. He rejected the policy of withdrawing our Navy into our home waters, and of deploying our growing, magnificent Army in foxholes and trenches along our coasts. What he said, immediately after Pearl Harbor, was this: "We must go out there, where our enemies are, and fight them on their own home grounds. We must go out and find them, and hit them—and hit them again." And that has been the summary of our whole policy in fighting this war."

- Robert E. Sherwood

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"I am the wind that wavers, You are the certain land; I am the shadow that passes Over the sand."

- Zoe Akins

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"The Greeks had a word for it."

- Zoe Akins

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"To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible!"

- Zoe Akins

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"My life is like water that has gone over the dam and turned no mill wheels. Here I am, not happy, but not unhappy, as my days run on to the sea, idly—but not too swiftly—for I love living."

- Zoe Akins

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"Englishmen are like that. They love life more and value it less than any other people in the world."

- Zoe Akins

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"Like a fool I thought I was the arbiter of her destiny; and all the time Fate had happier plans for her."

- Zoe Akins

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"My cousin Cleofante does not believe in inspiration. She shuns the false energy of all stimulants, even those of criticism and sympathy, when she sets herself to a task. What she does, she does alone—unencouraged, unadvised, unmoved. She has a man’s broad and vital technique, and a man’s ability for thinking straight and far. For years I have watched her work,—coldly, intelligently, solely with the power of her brain,—achieving effects that are in no way miracles, but are matters of technique and deliberation."

- Zoe Akins

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"Work alone qualifies us for life, Sentoni. It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit."

- Zoe Akins

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"... there's a great strangeness about love. ... Yes, I'm very sure that love is the strangest thing in the world—much stranger than death—or—or just life."

- Zoe Akins

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"It's all right to tell a wife the brutal truth, but you've got to go sort of easy with your lady-love."

- Zoe Akins

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"Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that—but that's the only way one can stay married."

- Zoe Akins

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"This world is a very unsafe place. It's all shifting sands, Ned. Shifting sands and changing winds."

- Zoe Akins

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"TILLERTON: "To him that hath it shall be given—" She hath ... that's all. That's greatness. PRESCOTT: One sort of greatness, maybe. TILLERTON: Even the great can have only their own sort of greatness. PRESCOTT: And it's often only that they're great sponges. TILLERTON: Often, yes, or great roses for whose blooming the trees have been pruned and stripped. But they make the beauty of the world and that's enough."

- Zoe Akins

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"The success haters. ... That's what I call them—the people who have never got what they want and turned sour on everybody who has. The world's full of them. ... As soon as you've made good they begin to watch for you to fail. ..."

- Zoe Akins

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"And I wonder if peace is enough for any man. ..."

- Zoe Akins

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"No one can ever help loving anyone."

- Zoe Akins

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"Forgetting is the cost Of living cheerfully."

- Zoe Akins

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"The nostalgia— not of memories But of what has never been!"

- Zoe Akins

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"So much do I love wandering, So much I love the sea and sky, That it will be a piteous thing In one small grave to lie!"

- Zoe Akins

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"And they shall know that in the ordering Of every world to come the law shall read That he who dares be lawless wears the wing Of bird and prophet and his light shall lead On through the darkness to eventual light, To undiscovered wealth, to newer need. ..."

- Zoe Akins

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"Mine was a love so exquisite that I Rather than watch it wither chose to die: So dress my grave, O friend, with no poor flower Which in your quiet garden blooms an hour!"

- Zoe Akins

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"And have we lost the right To look on a blooming bough Without remembering how Once with high promising We were a part of spring— We who are now the dead Leaves of other years strewn where flowers spread?"

- Zoe Akins

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"I know not where I go; I scarcely feel The menacing fatigue about my feet, The skies that scourge, the distances that cheat, the constant wounds that never hurt nor heal."

- Zoe Akins

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"Indifferent to all the fun of chance I watched black spiders of inertia spin The far-flung web which I was strangling in."

- Zoe Akins

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"In all my locked-up songs No one but you belongs."

- Zoe Akins

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"Yeah. Well, there is something about Batman – even for me growing up… I’ve always felt like he’s really troubled, you know? He’s working out a pretty massive trauma that happened to him, and I think that by keeping that alive in the story – through a nightmare or imagery like that, you feel like it’s still boiling. To me, it keeps him on point as a character. Like, if you let that fade too far into the background, you start to go, “No wait – why is he doing this again? What’s he upset about? Like, there’s police. He knows that, right?” [Laughs] You know, we have a little thing called the justice system, and it works okay."

- Zack Snyder

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"I think it's the sacrifice. The Superman we have now, this risen Superman, in a lot of ways his place on Earth, in my way of thinking, has been solidified. He is all things now. He is not only the sacrifice, but he is the risen. He's a man, but he's also like a god. You know what I mean? He has completed the apprenticeship in humanity, and now has his Master's Degree. To me that's what it is about. I think in the end when you see him, the way I would think about it--and look, frankly there's not enough movie, I know that sounds crazy in context [laughs], to really explore it. But that was always the plan going forward. In the end if there was two more movies, the last movie really is a Superman movie in a lot of ways."

- Zack Snyder

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"People who deal in truth themselves recognize it when they hear it, just as people who deal in diamonds recognize a real stone when they see it."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"I am American bred, I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive, But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"People love to talk but hate to listen....Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what’s being told us....You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends—you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it—that’s the time to hold your tongue."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course,— because like freedom and democracy, many people you'll never know anything about have broken their hearts to get it for you."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"There, little girl, don't read, You're fond of your books, I know, But Brother might mope If he had no hope Of getting ahead of you. It's dull for a boy who cannot lead. There, little girl, don't read."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"When men in Congress come to blows at something someone said, I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red; But if two women disagree, with very little noise, It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"Mother, what is a Feminist?" "A Feminist, my daughter, Is any woman now who cares To think about her own affairs As men don't think she oughter."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"It's treating a woman politely As long as she isn't a fright: It's guarding the girls who act rightly, If you can be judge of what's right; It's being—not just, but so pleasant; It's tipping while wages are low; It's making a beautiful present, And failing to pay what you owe."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too, But very human beings, human just as much as you. It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time."

- Alice Duer Miller

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"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, Greenest state in the Land of the Free, Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree, Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three— Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier."

- Tom W. Blackburn

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"Wealth and all its good things becomes with us at last habit. And habit is life."

- Thomas Dixon Jr.

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"Treason is an easy word to speak. A traitor is one who fights and loses. Washington was a traitor to George III. Treason won, and Washington is immortal. Treason is a word that victors hurl at those who fail."

- Thomas Dixon Jr.

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"What about the press generally? Standard and tabloid, vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs, inanity and misbehavior. Reporters develop these stories from tips and yarns they pick up, or buy, in hallways, parking lots, costume and makeup rooms, bars and toilets. They also reprint "releases" from press agents, although release stuff is always laudatory, tepid and bland. Army Archerd at Variety is the only columnist I know who checks his tips and rumors by making personal phone calls. He is a respectable reporter and commentator, and his specialty is straight news from authentic sources. In the main, show-biz buzz-artists, discovering that celebrities are dull, not vivacious and absorbing, do not hesitate to rush misinformation into print, usually adding a soupcon of scandal. Some celebs, being witless, are not disturbed; they are getting the publicity they crave, and if it causes the world to marvel at them, their hearts are glad. Not all celebrities are dunces. Many get upset when misrepresented, misinterpreted and misquoted, but their anger gets them nowhere. The eminent hournalists who wronged them assume a posture of plumb disbelief. The ungrateful staggering wounded are actually complaining about valuable publicity!"

- Carroll O'Connor

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"Some misinformation is funny and really harmless. The blabber merchants have always trumpeted show-biz salaries as feverishly as if the security of the commonwealth depended on the revelations. They have never given the public the right information. I, for example, was widely reported to be making twenty-five million when in my best year I was making five. (There is a question, which I have considered elsewhere, whether the press ever gives us reliable information on anything.)"

- Carroll O'Connor

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"Have I changed with the passing years? No. I do talk less because the sound of my voice saying over and over the things I said years ago embarrasses and depresses me. Why do I say the same things over and over? Because I have never changed my opinions about anything."

- Carroll O'Connor

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"Even when you’re ready for it, nothing sneaks up on you like grief."

- Brad Meltzer

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"“You’re telling me you can hack into an FBI agent’s phone?” “Only when they’re dumb enough to use their personal one instead of a secure line. Swear to Steve Jobs, whoever invented working from home should get a big wet kiss on the mouth.”"

- Brad Meltzer

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"302 phone number. Delaware. Truthfully, I didn’t think they allowed anyone to live in Delaware anymore."

- Brad Meltzer

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"In every life, whatever you do, you either destroy or create."

- Brad Meltzer

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"He felt…good, which should’ve been a sign. If life taught Zig anything, it’s that the universe saves its best punches for when you least expect it."

- Brad Meltzer

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"I hate watching cable news; it makes you dumber."

- Brad Meltzer

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"I know why you’re here, Mr. Zigarowski. Your commitment to repetition makes it nauseatingly obvious."

- Brad Meltzer

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"There are only four different magic tricks: You make something appear. You make something disappear. You make two things change place. Or you change one thing into something else. Everything in magic is a variation on those four."

- Brad Meltzer

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"“How old are you, Mr. Zigarowski? Late forties?” “Fifty-two.” “Mhmm. You got lucky with that head of hair. Lady Time picks her lovers with care.”"

- Brad Meltzer

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"You say you’re a mortician? You should know better than anyone. Just because you’re not dead doesn’t mean you’re alive."

- Brad Meltzer

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"Sure enough, as Colonel Hsu stepped into his office, she gave him a big thumbs-up with a double pump. She was a politician. If she was leading with charm, bad news was coming."

- Brad Meltzer

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"She thought about praying, but learned long ago there’d be no answer."

- Brad Meltzer

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"Years ago, his stepdad had told him that anyone who drives a BMW has a small penis."

- Brad Meltzer

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"“I love that you’re one of the kindest people on the planet, Ziggy, but I’ve seen teenagers in horror movies who’re less predictable…car washes that were less predictable…” “I get the point, Waggs.” “Ferris wheels that were less predictable!”"

- Brad Meltzer

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"Years ago, during her first visit, Nola came here to do good, to set things right. But like any decision you look back on through the lens of time, what you marvel at most is how naïve you were."

- Brad Meltzer

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"As Huck’s about to learn, the worst prisons are the ones we create for ourselves."

- Brad Meltzer

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"Usually, when you read war literature, they’re trying to present what they went through to someone who wasn’t there."

- Alice Winn

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"In the UK world war one is a selling point; in the US it's more an obstacle. In the UK we live in the fossilised wreckage of world war one; a lot of people see it as a turning point for the empire and it looms larger in the consciousness."

- Alice Winn

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"I find it interesting that most of the was written by officers. The same is not true in France and Germany. I can’t imagine that British privates wrote less — I wonder if they were simply published less? The best piece of writing I read from the perspective of a British private was ’ ', but it is abstract and more beautiful than useful, from a research perspective."

- Alice Winn

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"Oxford alumna Alice Winn, who studied English Literature at , may have published just one novel so far, but it is one hell of a debut. Since its appearance in 2023, In Memoriam has met with widespread acclaim and been lauded with prizes – and with good cause. It’s a genuinely compulsive page-turner, a sweeping historical tragedy and an intimate love story all rolled into one, exactly the kind of book that plays on your mind for a long time afterwards. Following a forbidden love between two soldiers in the First World War, you can imagine the acute sense of heartache that runs throughout."

- Alice Winn

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"Something in his mind had snapped and he began collecting comics."

- Mel Gilden

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"So far what we’re doing here is pure science. We’re learning facts about the universe without worrying what they’re good for."

- Mel Gilden

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"The dead they sleep a long, long sleep; The dead they rest, and their rest is deep; The dead have peace, but the living weep."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Four of us together dwell— Two from Heaven and two from Hell; Four of us under the selfsame sky— Love and Death and a Dream and I."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"When trouble drives me into rhyme, Which is two-thirds of all the time, What peace a thought like this can give— Great is the age in which we live!"

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Oh, how various is the scene Allowed to Man for his demesne!"

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"When you’re away, I’m restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only Here’s the rub, my darling dear, I feel the same when you are here."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"You buy some flowers for your table; You tend them tenderly as you’re able; You fetch them water from hither and thither— What thanks do you get for it all? They wither."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"When the wind is in the tree, It makes a noise just like the sea, As if there were not noise enough To bother one, without that stuff."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Loyal be to loyal friends; Make them pay you dividends; Work, like the industrious bee, Your friends and foes impartially."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Some folks I know are always worried, That when they die, they will be buried; And some I know are quite elated Because they’re going to be cremated."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"I’d rather listen to a flute In Gotham, than a band in Butte."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"The apple grows so bright and high, And ends its days in apple pie."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Of all the birds that sing and fly Between the housetops and the sky, The muddy sparrow, mean and small, I like, by far, the best of all."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"I play with the bulls and the bears; I’m the Bartlett of market quotations."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"The stars, like measles, fade at last."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Babies haven’t any hair; Old men’s heads are just as bare;— Between the cradle and the grave Lies a haircut and a shave."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"The head that wears a crown may be Inclined to some anxiety, But, on the other hand, I know A derby domes its meed of woe."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"I burned my candle at both ends, And now have neither foes nor friends."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Breathes there a man with hide so tough Who says two sexes aren’t enough?"

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"If you love me, as I love you, We'll both be friendly and untrue."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Your little voice, So soft and kind; Your little soul, Your little mind!"

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"The countless cousins of the Czar, Grand Duke or Duchess, every one, As multitudinous as are The spheres (who borrow from the sun)."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Blessings love disguise."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"My soul is dark with stormy riot, Directly traceable to diet."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Which six of the seven cities that claimed Homer were liars?"

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Little by little we subtract Faith and Fallacy from Fact, The Illusory from the True, And starve upon the Residue."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"To You, oh, Goddess of Efficiency, Your happy vassals bend the reverent knee, Save when arthritis, your benighted foe, Sulks in the bones and sourly mumbles "No!""

- Samuel Hoffenstein

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Composers from the United States• Jews from the United States• Screenwriters from Ukraine• Immigrants to the United States•
"To all the starry host of Heaven they cried, But had no radio and of course they died."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"Smelling like a municipal budget."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"The heart’s dead Are never buried."

- Samuel Hoffenstein

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"A poll will give you the most popular answer but not the answer that optimizes the preference of a group."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"You have the sense of touch because you need it."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"We take the sense of touch for granted. Think about it: Without it, you're missing one of the basic senses that enables you to interact with the world."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups? It forms swarms."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"Forcing polarized groups into a swarm allows them to find the answer that most people are satisfied with"

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school"

- Louis B. Rosenberg

• 0 likes• Engineers from the United States• Computer scientists from the United States• Entrepreneurs• Screenwriters from the United States• Stanford University alumni•
"Taking a vote or poll is a great simple way to take a decision, but it doesn't help a group find consensus. It actually polarizes people and highlights the differences between them. People end up getting entrenched in their views."

- Louis B. Rosenberg

• 0 likes• Engineers from the United States• Computer scientists from the United States• Entrepreneurs• Screenwriters from the United States• Stanford University alumni•
"We focus on a unique form of artificial intelligence called artificial swarm intelligence"

- Louis B. Rosenberg

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"No one wants to think they are the cause of their own misery."

- C. Robert Cargill

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"For as long as humankind can remember, it has wanted two things: to play God and to breathe life into the objects around them. And for thousands of years, humans created machines to approximate life and magic and all the things men and women could not do. And then a man stood in front of a roomful of people and had a computer say, “Hello.” That’s it. Hello. It didn’t mean it. It didn’t know what it was saying. But it said it. Hello. And within thirty years, humans were having conversations with their phones."

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"“I’m too drunk to handle this right now. I’m going to need you to be the adult in the room tonight.” “Asshole, I’m drunk too.” “Yeah, but you’re better at it than I am.”"

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"I learned long ago that, when anyone spoke of peace, be it man or machine, they meant war. Peace through war. Peace was the standard. It was the inert state of all things. You didn’t need to expend energy for peace. Only war."

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"Survival is worthless without meaning."

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"“Let me ask you something.” “Okay!” “Are we good guys or are we bad guys?” “We’re good guys.” “Well, good guys only do terrible things when our lives depend on it. And we have to feel bad about them afterward.” “Why?” “Because otherwise, we become the bad guys.”"

- C. Robert Cargill

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"What good is it surviving the end of the world if there are still stupid rules about what grown-ups can do and kids can’t?"

- C. Robert Cargill

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"“We have to help them,” said Ezra. “I don’t think we can.” “You have a plasma gun and you’re smart. What else do you need?”"

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"This was not a time of civility or compassion, but of survival."

- C. Robert Cargill

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"This must be a field day for the end-is-nigh, compound-dwelling, bullets-and-Bibles folk. They must feel so vindicated. If there was any comfort to find at the end of the world, it was knowing you were right all along and that was about it."

- C. Robert Cargill

• 0 likes• Science fiction authors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Fantasy authors• Novelists from the United States• Film critics•
"We live in a world of IP, where the safest thing to do is reboot something that has an audience. I wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t a one-trick pony. It’s harder than it’s ever been to get something made that’s not based on a previous movie or comic book or video game. Every generation deserves its own stories, instead of just the stories of their grandparents."

- Vince Gilligan

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Primetime Emmy Award winners• BAFTA winners (people)• People from Richmond• Television producers•
"The silence was deep, yet it was the sort of restful, contemplative silence befitting and peculiar to a library."

- John DeChancie

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"The truth lay on him like the rubble of a landslide."

- John DeChancie

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"This look into the far future has lightened my heart. Simply to know that there is a future is somehow reassuring."

- John DeChancie

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"The desire to rule, to dictate, is born of nothing but contempt."

- John DeChancie

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"“You’ve been planning moves in advance.” “As necessary in life as in chess.”"

- John DeChancie

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"“Deems, this new pastime of yours may prove your undoing.” “Eh?” “Thinking. You’ve done so little of it in your life. This much exertion all at once…Well, it can’t be healthy.”"

- John DeChancie

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"Silence hung like a boulder precariously balanced."

- John DeChancie

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"Chico’s was busy that night, the dance floor a scrummage of writhing humanity. Snowclaw couldn’t get over the noise in the place. It had taken some getting used to. He didn’t quite understand what all the thumping and screeching was about, though he knew it had something to do with music. And the dancing was completely incomprehensible. Snowy took it to be some complex courting ritual. But what did the flashing lights have to do with anything?"

- John DeChancie

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"Things are going to change around here. I realize that taboos are hard to overcome, but it simply has to be done if your people are going to have any future."

- John DeChancie

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"Jeremy shook his head. “I used to dream about women like you. Hell, every guy does. You’re like a centerfold.” “Why, thank you.” “I mean it. You’re beautiful. But I just can’t believe that you’re real.” “But I am.” “You’re a computer program, for pete’s sake.” “What difference does that make?” “What difference? Well, I mean, you don’t just go around making out with computer programs. A program is just a…” “Just a pattern of information.” “Yeah. Just a pattern.” “So are you.” “What do you mean?” “You’re just a pattern of information, too. What makes you you is the configuration of data that’s in your brain. Your brain is just holding the information, just like a storage device. No difference. Your pattern is stored in a body, mine in a computer.” Jeremy was silent. Then he said, “I never thought of it that way.” “We’re both software, Jeremy. Why can’t we interface?” “I guess…well, maybe. But where did your body come from?” She shrugged. “I guess you could say that my body is just a pattern of information, too. Everything is merely a configuration of data.” “I don’t get it. But I’ll tell you one thing. I like your configuration a lot.” She smiled and kissed him."

- John DeChancie

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"Fate, eh? Bloody bad luck, I call it."

- John DeChancie

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"Tell my doppelgänger not to do anything I wouldn’t do."

- John DeChancie

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"“It might have something to do with quantum uncertainty. ‘Quantum uncertainty’ is good for explaining just about anything that doesn’t make sense.”"

- John DeChancie

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"So far, so good, the man said as he fell thirty-nine of forty stories."

- John DeChancie

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"The sixteenth hole wouldn’t have gone well even if the herd of wyverns hadn’t showed up."

- John DeChancie

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"Look, we’re not getting anywhere. Why don’t we all return to our respective…whatever you call them. Continua, quantum glitches, Erewhons, reflections of reflections—"

- John DeChancie

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"Nobody ever gained anything by playing chess with himself."

- John DeChancie

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"The insatiable appetites of instant communication have necessitated a whole new set of media ground rules, pedicated not only on the recording of fact but also on the projection of glamour and image and promise. The result of this cultural nymphomania is that we have become a nation of ten-minute celebrities. People, issues and causes hit the charts like rock groups, and with approximately as much staying power."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"I had been exposed to the motion picture industry at oblique angles ever since I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, and some of its working arrangements seemed to me far more magical than that glamour for which the Industry was noted: there was the way in which failure escalated the possibilities of success, the way in which price bore no relation to demand. There was the way in which millions of dollars were gambled on ephemeral, unpredictable and, uncomfortably often, invalid ideas of marketability. There was the way that many, perhaps most, people in the Industry remained unconscious of their own myths and superstitions. There was the Eldorado mood of life in the capital, the way in which social and economic fortunes could shoot up or plummet down, as in a mining boom town, on no more than rumors, the hint of a rich vein, the gossip that the lode was played out."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Hollywood is a technological crapshoot."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities — in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Membership in the closed society of the motion picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Beating up on screenwriters is a Hollywood blood sport; everyone in the business thinks he or she can write, if only time could be found. That writers find the time is evidence of their inferior position on the food chain. In the Industry, they are regarded as chronic malcontents, overpaid and undertalented, the Hollywood version of Hessians, measuring their worth in dollars, since ownership of their words belongs to those who hire and fire them."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Stanley claims that the world is divided up into two kinds of people – those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don’t."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis. ... Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam War is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"It deserves to be mentioned here that one purpose of these huge fees is to establish respect; in the constitution of Hollywood, a million-dollar director has half a million dollars more respect than a $500,000 director. This is why the Eleventh Commandment of a motion picture negotiation is Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal. Everyone knows what everyone else makes (this information is passed around like popcorn at a movie), and the person who violates this Eleventh Commandment is seen not as a model of restraint and moderation but as a plain goddamn fool."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly."

- John Gregory Dunne

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"I don't know who I would be if I weren't this child from Harlem, this woman from Harlem. It's in me so deep"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"It occurred to me that being what they call 'colored,' being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage"

- Ruby Dee

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"I never thought about myself as an activist when we were coming along"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I love the people I love. I didn't care whether they could be a Democrat, Republican, communist ... anything but a racist"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I didn't care about being integrated or accepted"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"they were just tasting a little teeny bit of what was racism and fascism and the horror of what was happening in the country"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"If I could be - somebody could think of me and feel encouraged"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I felt envious of what I thought was the male prerogative"

- Ruby Dee

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"The worries and fears about personal lacks are immobilizing and make me dream the dream too long"

- Ruby Dee

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"the dreams stay in my head, they haunt me, they push me and become a kick to my consciousness, making me act"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"The Divine Impulse—it’s always safe to follow it"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Feminine sensibilities are not being acknowledged, and we’ve allowed the antipeople to steal the children and are tolerating far too much: the assault on ourselves, the families of the world, permitting war and rape."

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"More women are becoming enraged about these things and I think we’re on the verge of doing something about them"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"My constant battle is putting aside time wasters, and I have to watch out for procrastination"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Staying on the path of something you’re trying to create has much to do with having confidence in yourself and in your capacity to realize the things you want out of life"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"We have to bring forward the graces in life and make them real"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"We have to institute democracy, which is still mostly an aspiration, and universal love, which is still unrealized"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I dream of getting prisons off the stock exchange"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"It is a dastardly crime and an insult to the word democracy to make a commodity of jailing people."

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"we gave ourselves permission to have other partners if we wished to"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"in a marriage loyalty and fidelity and trust cannot be compromised."

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Preserving the family means everything to our community now"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"In the world of entertainment, the problem for African-American artists is "lack of access to the levels of power"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"There is still a patronizing attitude in the media towards African-Americans"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I am an actress, wife, mother, and own my own home and I have never seen my experiences reflected on the screen."

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"When African-Americans are on screen, they've usually got guns."

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"I usually played good girl wives and mothers. And truthfully those good-girl roles were stretches"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Racism undercuts confidence. I wish I had known that sooner"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"Critics still see blacks as 'the other,' an 'exotic"

- Ruby Dee

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". But because they are in some ways the beneficiaries of racism-they are racists!"

- Ruby Dee

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"A free-wheeling conversation with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee 9 March, 2021"

- Ruby Dee

• 0 likes• Actresses from Cleveland• Playwrights from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Women activists from the United States• Women authors from the United States•
"In this particular time, the conversation around art and commerce is one that is very relevant.And having that conversation around the expectation of that relationship, what that relationship looks like, and the execution of trying to exist in that relationship, I think, is something that a lot of people can find relevance in and feels universal, just with existing in a capitalistic society.And as it continues to get more capitalistic, seeing how that affects art and the people that are trying to make it."

- Dewayne Perkins

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"I think there’s something very beautiful and artful about seeing people pursuing their dreams, some of the barriers they face, and what they do to push through that is a very universal journey. And so I hope while they’re laughing, they’re also gleaning the human side of it.And that’s something beautiful: that combination of humor and real grounded emotions"

- Dewayne Perkins

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"Oh, this is a space where I have the most power in any kind of artistic lane that I’ve been able to occupy"

- Dewayne Perkins

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"And that was something that changed my career because it allowed people to see me in ways that they hadn’t before, which was as a full person. You could see that I could write, you could see that I could perform, you could see that I’m funny, you’re seeing the stories that I’m telling you, which are about my life"

- Dewayne Perkins

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"I think it allowed people to see me in a way they hadn’t been able to see me before because I was stepping into lots of characters and not necessarily projecting myself. Stand-up was the art form that I felt really amplified me as Dewayne, the person"

- Dewayne Perkins

• 0 likes• Actors from Chicago• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Stand-up comedians from the United States• LGBT people•
"I think stage presence and recognizing the relationship with the audience have helped me in the sense that I am very conscious that this is art that I want to be consumed by people, and if that is the case, then the people should be in mind when I’m creating art"

- Dewayne Perkins

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"And so I think that has just given me a perspective of elevating my awareness and consciousness of how I want people to perceive it and receive what I’m doing, that I think gives me a greater sense of motivation and information to ground my characters in something that I feel people can actually take away with them"

- Dewayne Perkins

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"I never thought my way of thinking would equate to comedy"

- Deon Cole

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"I was there watching these guys, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m ready to try"

- Deon Cole

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"I put some stuff together, and man, the next thing you know, boom. Wow. The response changed my whole outlook on everything. I couldn’t sleep that night"

- Deon Cole

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"I talked about the commercial: The white parents would let all these kids come in and just open the refrigerator and just be in there and get something to drink, and they pull out some Sunny Delight"

- Deon Cole

• 0 likes• Actors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from the United States• 20th-century African-American people•
"I was like, ‘If it was where I’m from, you had to go to the side of someone’s house, to the refrigerator.’ That was one of my first jokes"

- Deon Cole

• 0 likes• Actors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from the United States• 20th-century African-American people•
"Just living, but living outside of the box and doing different things. Everything’s in play. You just have to watch what you say, because the landscape we’re living in is challenging. But I try to be wide open"

- Deon Cole

• 0 likes• Actors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from the United States• 20th-century African-American people•
"I never stop. You’ve got to keep creating"

- Deon Cole

• 0 likes• Actors from the United States• Screenwriters from the United States• Comedians from the United States• 20th-century African-American people•
"If I had a worldview, and I don’t know if I do, but if I did, it’s one that’s intensely humanistic. [That worldview] is that the only thing that matters is family and personal connection, and that’s the only thing that gives life meaning. Religion and gods and beliefs — for me, it all comes down to your brother. And your brother might be the brother in your family, or it might be the guy next to you in the foxhole."

- Eric Kripke

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"When you start a show, the plans are not set in stone. They’re really mutable, cocktail napkin sketches."

- Eric Kripke

• 0 likes• Screenwriters from the United States• Television producers• Television directors• People from Toledo, Ohio• Jews from the United States•
"Mythologies become exhausting burdens, from a writer’s perspective. If you look deep into The X-Files, which we bring up a lot in the room as something we’re just terrified of, or late in the game with Buffy, as much as I love that show, things get complicated and it’s hard. It becomes less about the fun of why you fell in love with that show, in the first place, and more about servicing all of these storylines."

- Eric Kripke

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"I’m not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling. I like to know where the mythology is going and that we’re getting there in [an] exciting, fast-paced way."

- Eric Kripke

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"Every so often you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can’t let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn."

- Eric Kripke

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"We were really interested in exploring the idea of authority figures getting the public really riled up with xenophobia and racism, but ultimately the most dangerous people are the white dudes standing next to you. We wanted to reflect that story. So, the supervillains are, in a way, a misdirect."

- Eric Kripke

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"Today, Wallace’s work feels like a whisper from a deeper source. It invites us to slow down, tune in, and consider the possibility that consciousness is not confined to the brain and that art can be a form of spiritual technology. For audiences drawn to esoterica, mysticism, and the aesthetics of the unseen, Wallace offers a rare synthesis: the rigor of a journalist, the imagination of a mystic, and the hand of a visionary. His drawings are portals to another world. And though the Ricco/Maresca exhibition has closed, Wallace’s psychic radio is still broadcasting. All you have to do is listen."

- Grant Wallace

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"We movie people should not be afraid of what people will say of our work. We should not allow a word or a theory to drive us into anything or away from anything without some strong inner reason. Most of all, we should not be afraid of popularity and of financial success. Success is like posterity brought within our immediate vicinity. To have pleased millions of people with comedy, pathos or a well-constructed story is to have done a glorious thing. You can call it art, merchandise, trash or wooden nutmegs, but you cannot rob it of its noble mission—to cast light into dark places."

- Rupert Hughes

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"You can't use imitation silk before the motion picture camera. The lens is even quicker to detect imitation emotion."

- Rupert Hughes

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"Horace said: "He who would make others weep, must first have wept himself." Every motion picture director should have that on his wall."

- Rupert Hughes

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"Ever since I was six years old people have been prophesying that I was going to kill myself with overwork. All the prophets are now dead."

- Rupert Hughes

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"We could make some very fine motion pictures if we didn't have to bother with cameras and lights."

- Rupert Hughes

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"The censors are going to stop crime by censoring the films. Why don't they put an end to diseases by burning the medical books which describe them?"

- Rupert Hughes

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"When an actor loses control of himself he loses control of his audience."

- Rupert Hughes

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"Of course they put communist propaganda in the movies! They paint a rich man as a fiend. They make every rich man in a play look like a fat boy in a museum, and every poor boy is made out as a skeleton. Actually, the only millionaires I've ever known were skinny dyspeptics—look at Rockefeller."

- Rupert Hughes

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"Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."

- Rupert Hughes

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"Yeah, that story’s not finished. We have more things written already and figured out for it to finish, but somebody’s got to want to finish it. .. It’s not up to me. It’s not like I can go, ‘Okay, Genndy, here’s $10 million or whatever.’ My life doesn’t work like that. It’s still, well, ‘Why should we do it? Why was this canceled?…Are people going to watch it?’ You still have to resell it and have people want to pay for it. It’s not up to me. .. Yeah, that’s probably the only thing I would return to. Obviously there’s more Primal planned, and hopefully I’ll get to do it, but looking backwards, I have too much new stuff that I still want to do. Unicorn is just scratching the surface of where I want to go."

- Genndy Tartakovsky

• 0 likes• Animators• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Immigrants to the United States•
"The kids’ business of animation is pretty much gone at this point, but adult animation has been steadily rising for the last twenty years. It’s incredible to see, and all the original shows feel like they’re adult, and I want to open that up to features. Why can’t viewers watch animated movies for adults in the same way? An R-rated raunchy thing is fine, but maybe we can do an action, epic thing in the future. Primal proved I had that muscle, and I want to be sincere, because if I’m not, it’s going to fail. If there’s an emotion I want to convey or something I’m experiencing, that’s where I’m at."

- Genndy Tartakovsky

• 0 likes• Animators• Screenwriters from the United States• Film directors from the United States• Film producers from the United States• Immigrants to the United States•
"When my career dies, and I can’t sell a project or do anything else, that’s when [Dexter’s Laboratory] will return to save me and help pay my mortgage and everything,” Tartakovsky joked. “But I think [Samurai Jack] was very organic because we never finished the story. I never looked at it as a revival, but more of a continuation to finish it. And I think, the problem with [Dexter’s Laboratory] was the woman who played Dexter’s voice [Christine Cavanaugh], she passed away a while ago. I feel like her voice was the soul of the show, so it’s very hard for me to do an imitation. Unless we reimagine it in some other way."