Novelists From The United States

"A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils."

"Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on, please. Some of us aren’t civil service workers: our time is valuable."

"His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste—they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key."

"The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is, is real."

"“Size, power, numbers—since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven’t succeeded.” Nodding, the Ambassador murmured, “Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death.”"

"“I’ve always been a loner. With whatever help I can buy, I take care of myself. I’m not interested in any goal except the extra buck. First and last, I’m a businessman.” “Oh, stop it!” the dark man took a turn up and down the office angrily. “This is a planet-wide emergency. There are times when you can’t be a businessman.” “I deny that. I can’t conceive of such a time.” Braganza snorted. “You can’t be a businessman if you’re strapped to a huge pile of blazing faggots. You can’t be a businessman if people’s minds are so thoroughly controlled that they’ll stop eating at their leader’s command. You can’t be a businessman, my slavering, acquisitive friend, if demand is so well in hand that it ceases to exist.” “That’s impossible.” Hebster had leaped to his feet. To his amazement, he heard his voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. “There’s always demand. Always! The trick is to find what new form it’s taken and then fill it!” “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of your religion.”"

"Science, my forward-looking friend, is a complex of interlocking theories, all derived from observation."

"Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t it can buy?"

"But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “Except on days when there’s an eclipse.”"

"“They said you treated them very well, that you showed them as much respect as a thing like you could generate. They also said you cheated them.” “Oh, well, Theseus,” Hebster spread his manicured hands. “I’m a businessman.”"

"He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it. “I can make money,” he quoted to himself. “That’s what I’m good for. That’s what I can always do.”"

"“It's a rough war, isn't it?” I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”"

"The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man."

"Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil."

"“Wh-who are you? And what do you want?” “Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman.” He considered for a moment. “Well, poor, anyway.”"

"They are a highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life."

"Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends."

"Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither."

"He knew what the score was—and from here on out, he would be acting on what he knew rather than on what others told him."

"And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia."

"Von Soden observes that “since the discovery of the Indus civilization … it has been almost universally accepted that the Sumerians immigrated from the east.” The immigrants are regarded as having arrived in lower Mesopotamia either at the beginning of the Ubaid period (c. 5000 B.C.) or at the beginning of the Uruk period (perhaps c. 3500 B.C., but perhaps as late as 3250). In either case, the Sumerians seem to have fitted easily into an advanced Chalcolithic culture where writing was already in the early stages of development. Therefore, the implication is that they must have been from another advanced culture, and that points to the East. Bottero agrees that “the Sumerians must have arrived in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium, apparently from the southeast.” Von Soden further observes that “this immigration could have succeeded entirely by land if the Sumerians immigrated from somewhere in northern India,” and refers suggestively to “the westward migration of the Sumerian groups, whose language may have been related to the Dravidian languages of India.”"

"This book of 700 close-printed pages is remarkable for its range of erudition covering the ancient religiophilosophical thought and some aspects of the art of the diverse cultures from Greece through the Near East to Persia and India. It is the fruit of some 30 years of research. But is is also remarkable for many misrepresentations, some egregious errors of fact and, consequently, injudicious conclusions.... McEvilley himself, as has been demonstrated in the preceding pages, shows repeated willfulness in (mis-)representing and (mis-)handling of the evidence. Nonetheless, this erudite book is worth consulting provided the reader can spot the author’s facile assumptions, careless remarks, sweeping generalizations and unwarranted judgments."

"This is a stimulating book. But... it suffers from assuming the late but generally accepted in Western academic circles dating of the Ṛgveda, as well as McEvilley’s lack of a specialist’s knowledge of the Ṛgveda and early Indian thought. ...In general, McEvilley sees undue Ancient Mesopotamian and to a lesser extent Ancient Egyptian influence behind the development of Indus Valley civilization and in the specifics of Vedic and later Indian literature, which tendency is so exaggerated that it comes across as an unpleasant prejudice."

"“Still, modern western attitudes towards Plotinus have not been shaped by the widespread acknowledgment of the extraordinary similarity of his teachings to doctrines taught in India in his day; but by the role he unwittingly played after his death as a formative influence on Christian theology. Translations of his work may have a churchy kind of ring. The view of Plotinus as a kind of proto-Christian may express, at least in part, a dread of finding possible Indian origins for the texts whose influence was to contribute to shaping the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhardt, and many later western thinkers. So it is not only that “to admit 'oriental influences' on [Plotinus] was tantamount to besmirching his good name,” but even more it would also besmirch that whole aspect of the western tradition that flowed from him. If Plotinus had passed massive Asian influence into the western tradition, there would be little point to calling it western anymore.”"

"Thomas McEvilley has explained the likely Indian origins of some aspects of Greek thought. For instance, he says the Western intellectuals' cover-up of the likely Indian origins of Plotinus protects Western identity and historicity: 'Translations of his work may have a churchy kind of ring. The view of Plotinus as a kind of proto-Christian theologian may express, at least in part, a dread of finding possible Indian origins for the texts whose influence was to contribute to shaping the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, and many later Western thinkers. So it is not only that "to admit oriental influences on [Plotinus] was tantamount to besmirching his good name," but even more, it would also besmirch that whole aspect of the Western tradition that flowed from him. If Plotinus had passed massive Asian influence into the Western tradition, there would be little point to calling it Western tradition' ."

"Romila Thapar, an Indian historian... is reviled by some Indian scholars for her acquiescence to many western points of view."

"Still, it would be an equally egregious mistake to conclude that India lacks a distinctive and world-important character of its own. Nothing, it seems, comes out of nothing, and no culture is born by parthenogenesis. Ancient Greek culture has had at least as much input from the same sources without being denied its own “miraculous” selfhood."

"Mary is un-actressy, though, herself, one of the least actressy actresses I have ever known. She is no more given to ostentatious behavior than she is to big hats. In fact, the impression she gives is more that of a successful woman lawyer; that has something to do with her native intelligence. [...] [A]s a person there is so little sham in her that you wonder at her spending forty years working in artificial light. It has always been the work she likes and not the limelight. "Let's work," she says at rehearsal and if there is too much chat about it, "Let's get back to work.""

"If I ever do make Beau Brummel, I want that girl to play Lady Margery Alvanley."

"When I think of Mary Astor, which is quite often, that prayer that was recited over our heads at College comes to mind. "Lord" (or some such), "who has granted that when two or three are gathered together in Thy Name, Thou wilt grant their requests . . ." And I have thought how strange it is, and how indisputable, that when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played. And all this in spite of—or because of—the fact that she was never exactly a star. [...] [She] conceive[d] of her performance from the start in the terms the author laid down, not in terms of her own personality. This is why every performance she gave has the ring of truthfulness and the depth of reality. She was never a good liar."

"Turn her loose, Robert. You might learn something."

"Nobody gave me anything. I had to fight to do scripts and fight not to do scripts and go on suspension and sue, and that's what saved me. Take Mary Astor. I had to fight to get her into ', and she won the Oscar, and then did The Maltese Falcon and had a whole new career. She was beautiful, and a fine actress, but she could never be sure of that, because she was so beautiful that everything was handed to her right from the beginning only because of her beauty. So that led to insecurity and drinking and terrible scandals, and she became her own worst enemy."

"Mary Astor said nothing but stared a lot over the top of her glasses, and I thought this was a woman that no one will get close to. To my surprise she asked everyone to autograph the front page of her script. She was collecting autographs, she said, from every television play she had ever done. It was the first intimation of what it took me a long time to realize: She nearly always likes the people she works with. What I had taken to be offhandedness was her way of covering her terror of live television. Anyway, in that ill-lit ballroom, there she was, a good deal older than when she had won her Academy Award but not much changed; the darkly red hair in the mannish cut, that profile, the freckles, eyes the color of cracked hazelnuts. And the unique voice, a cello voice, Edith Cortright's voice in Dodsworth, a voice that has a trick to it: It can make a banal line seem intelligent; it has had experience doing that."

"I think "laconic" is a good word for and for his technique of direction. No big deal about communication with John. Terse, pithy, to the point. Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal, but once he said to me while I was doing a scene with Ray Massey, "Make it scan, Mary." And I said to myself, "Aha! I know you now!"."

"Under contract, for some weird reason, you get typed, stuck into the same part, over and over again. In my case, it was mother roles. It isn't that I didn't like being a mother: I had two wonderful children of my own. But Metro's Mothers never did anything but mothering. They never had a thought in their heads except their children. They sacrificed everything: they were domineering or else the "Eat up all your spinach" type. Clucking like hens. Eventually every actor on the Metro lot called me Mom. I was in my late thirties and it played hell with my image of myself. And my image of the Diary days went right down the drain."

"There is a kind of attitude, a manner of speaking, a look in the eye, the kind of smile you get, the embrace from a director or producer that carries the most depressing hypocrisy: "Hey! You know you're still looking pretty sexy!" "Wow, you still got it, you know!" "You haven't got a worry in the world—you can be right up there again." Translated, in means "The old girl still looks pretty good." But the old girl, now nearing fifty, is not a young girl, is not sexy and has no intention of competing with anybody. Competition has never been my thing, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be right up there again. [...] I wanted to put my craft, what I had learned, my experiences, to work. The myth of Sunset Boulevard, with the old glamorous actress looking at all her old movies in the sumptuous, decaying mansion, is just that. It may have been taken from a factual story of some kind of nut—but believe me, that isn't where old actresses go!"

"As far as acting was concerned, I simply did what I was told. This I was good at. For too many years I had searched for cues as to my father's disposition and desires. And this ability called forth praise of "How beautifully she takes direction!" You bet I did! In silents the direction went on during the action: after the camera turned, I'd hear, "Now look at him, Mary—that's it—you can't believe it! Tears come to your eyes—reach out and touch his arm—gently, gently." The more experienced actors would refuse anything but the minimum of offstage cueing, like perhaps, "You hear the door slam," but I wouldn't have been able to carry a whole scene without help. Not because I'd forget what we had done in rehearsal, but because I was afraid I'd do it wrong. You see, I was "stupid"—I really thought I was—and that was the role I played in life. It was very safe."

"That guy over there, Ray Massey. He can put his boots under my bed any day of the week."

"Acting was my parents' idea for me. I happened to have a very pretty face. It was a very pretty face indeed, and it was sold to the highest bidder, that's all. I wanted to be a writer. I didn't know that until about 15 years ago, and I've been writing ever since. And that's about all I want to do."

"Yes, I do miss my "family." That great big family I accumulated over the years. [...]. We shared the ephemeral quality, the sense of impermanence of the medium we worked in. Often when a scene was being worked over in rehearsal, experimenting, nit-picking about words and moves, somebody would break up the over-seriousness with the question, "Who's waiting for this opera, anyway?" and we'd all laugh and realize it was all something that shouldn't be taken too seriously—and yet, if it wasn't taken seriously it wasn't any good. I miss these people who were part of my life—co-workers, co-actors. Friends. And I watch the new ones, the new breed, and when they do something great and fine, I'm proud. And when they do things that are blatantly bad, I am ashamed. But I can't disinherit them, for no matter how much they may feel that it is a whole new thing, it isn't really. It is a continuation. For what they have today was built upon the great and fine and the blatantly bad jobs that we did—we old movie-makers."

"My father often used to rebuke me by saying, "You're almost nine years old" (and then "ten," and then "eleven," and "twelve") "and you haven't learned a thing!" Well, here I was, fifty years old and I still hadn't learned a thing! My father's rebuke had always seemed to imply a promise that years, the very accumulation of years, would bring experience and understanding. So, at whatever age I was, I wished I were older. At seventeen I longed to be twenty-five. At twenty I wanted to be a woman of the world of thirty. At thirty I read that the French thought a woman did not reach full maturity of beauty and attractiveness until she was forty. Finally, at forty-five, I decided that the whole thing was a pack of lies. Where was the "serenity" that the years were to bring? Where was :"the cooling of passion's blood?" I realized that I, who leaned on so many people and things, had been leaning even on the abstraction of time."

"Tuesday night we had a dinner at ‘21’ and on the way to see ' he did kiss me—and I don’t think either of us remember much what the show was about. We played kneesies during the first two acts, my hand wasn’t in my own lap during the third. It’s been years since I’ve felt up a man in public, but I just got carried away. Afterwards we had a drink someplace and then went to a little flat in 73rd Street where we could be alone, and it was all very thrilling and beautiful. Once George lays down his glasses, he is quite a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long. It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. I didn’t see much of anybody else the rest of the time—we saw every show in town, had grand fun together and went frequently to 73rd Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me.”"

"Another offering that is on the grim side but will hold your interest as a dramatic story in A Place Called Saturday, by Mary Astor. The former screen actress tells the story of a rape—and its effect on not only the victim, an Arizona housewife, but also on her husband and her "friends," one of whom, as it turns out, is "is going steady," as they used to say, with the rapist. There's everything here, from impotence to abortion, and Miss Astor is rapidly developing, from book to book, no mean ability at pulling out emotional stops."

"If I could only get to see Mary Astor! Mary Astor was always my favorite actress. [...] When Mary Astor sat down to play the piano, she bloody well played the thing."

"It was an awfully persuasive theory, he had to admit. And even if it was wrong, he was starting to realize that God had to be an alien. There just wasn’t any other possible explanation. And that really scared him. All his life he had been so sure of his religion. When his daughters had died, it was the only thing he had left to hold on to. But had the devotion of his life to religion been misplaced? No, it couldn’t be. God couldn’t be an electronic alien. There had to be another explanation.… He forced a stop to that line of thought. He knew a rationalization when he saw it, and he considered himself pretty good at keeping his mind from coming to false conclusions just because of his beliefs. He used to be a scientist, after all. Not someone who would rationalize away clear evidence of aliens just because of some statements in the Journal. He had always told Katrina that if new scientific proof surfaced that his religion was wrong, he would admit he was mistaken. Well, now that had happened. There simply were intelligent aliens in the universe, and he would have to come to grips with it."

"Feelings of desperation clouded his mind. Could this be? Was this the final trap of a “provable” religion based purely on science? Was it inevitable that advances in scientific knowledge would disprove any religion, given enough time? And if science kept advancing, if they could never know everything, then no religion could ever be eternally true. In his last sermon Paul had claimed that science had backed God into a tiny corner of the unknown; but what if known science was the tiny corner, and the unknown lay vaster than anyone had imagined? If so, how could any religion ever claim to be compatible with science?"

"She shrugged. “Maybe he is making sense. Maybe we’re just not trying hard enough to understand.”"

"“I was right! He said he was in a spaceship! A small spaceship! It’s some alien spaceship up by the moon!” Without hesitating, she turned her attention back to God. “Are you in orbit around the moon?” Her smile softened a little bit. “He says…he says the moon is going around him.” Paul shrugged. “Well, it’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose. But I still don’t buy this alien business.” Katrina rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, dear, if it messes up your theology and all that, but I’m telling you, we are communicating with an alien intelligence here.”"

"As remarkably strange as this event was, after a very short while he began to get bored. One of the great human abilities, he thought: tuning out the most fantastic events just because they happen slightly too often."

"I’m just saying it’s a possibility. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s not true."