Novelists From The United States

"“If you think that Man is free to build a new life while the rest of the world drifts by, then you do not know anything of history!”"

"The trick of course was not to go just anywhere, but to go where they might accomplish something useful."

"What you need to do is take control of things. Don't wait for events to catch up with you; go and meet them head-on!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We have a saying where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness."

"“Now I’m going to make you angry again.” “Really?” I asked, drily. “Aren’t you getting tired of that?”"

"It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose."

"If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward."

"People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren’t quite so simple."

"What, after all, was the point of civilization if not the well-being of citizens?"

"Her respectful tone sounded almost sincere."

"Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions."

"You don’t like me saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one generally doesn’t have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience."

"I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality."

"You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard."

"It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see."

"You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it."

"Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late."

"“Not safe?” I asked, all innocence. “Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"How My Egoism Died"

"The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people."

"A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."

"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."

"Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty."

"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."

"The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them."

"There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age."

"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."

"I was afraid you would think I was bragging."

"People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized."

"The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links."

"In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."

"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."

"You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?"

"The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away."

"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."