people-from-hartford

"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."

"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."

"I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge."

"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."

"Hollywood is a technological crapshoot."

"Membership in the closed society of the motion picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings."

"The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We fear not science. We deplore ignorance. If the men of science will be true to their reason, we will meet them on every field and teach them the harmonies of nature and of faith. We will show them how the human mind turns from the creature in all its variety and beauty to the creature's God."

"And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over."

"Age had not yet defeated her on all fronts, though it was a war of attrition she knew she was fated to lose."

"The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin."

"There were idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality."

"Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just…cut down trees?"

"Any government founded on a political or religious agenda more elaborate than “protect the weak, temper the strong” is doomed to tyranny."

"Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out."

"Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs."

"He wouldn’t be much of a diplomat if he couldn’t lie with a straight face."

"I said, “It just seems weird that I’m in bed with somebody I’ve never met.” As I said it I realized how foolish it was. Anytime you’re in bed with somebody, you’re in bed with everybody who came before you—everybody who hurt them, healed them, shaped them. All those ghosts are in the room."

"Depression is realism."

"The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall."

"While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages."

"We claim the dignity of age, she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all."

"“Kill or be killed,” Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra."

"“You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God,” he said, “the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn’t would be a fucking good place to start.”"

"We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future."

"“Hypocrite,” she said. But she laughed. “Doesn’t it get tiring being so damned morally superior all the time?”"

"“Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions—or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.”"

"I was sure it wouldn't be here because it was my home parish, I received all my sacraments here and I expect I will be buried here. This is a densely populated archdiocese and the work is staggering."

"In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skycrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniatures Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water."

"He stared the assorted meannesses and failed promises of American life straight in the face, and they stared back."

"It took me quite a while to learn how to do the corporate dance. I was just too defensive. I just got involved with too much and I don't have to do that. All my companies that I work with have been around for years with me. They got the brand down. They keep it going in a really good way. I realized one day I am not going to love all the people around me. I did with my company, because we really ran it like a family. Everybody loved everybody else, and they still do. I still have my pink lady sorority club going on."

"I have my on and I have my off switch. I'm as exuberant and whatever else you want to call me; I'm very private. I usually go out to dinner here by myself, five o'clock. I love it. I mean, who could ever live up to that Betsey? I'm too much for myself to live up to. I'm very opposite, privately…"

"...On one side, there was super, super conservative, regular girl-next-door. And on the other side, there was this kind of fantasyland, pretend, dancing-school, wonderfulness: you know, the hair, the makeup, the costumes, the music, the recital halls. I mean, so for me, I needed that balance."

"Every time I went down the aisle, I was totally, 100 percent in love. I loved being in love. And the downside was, I really was attracted to men very opposite from myself. You know, that old story. You know, if you're warm, they're cold. If you're a hard worker, maybe they're lazy. If you were realist, they're a pessimist?..."

"Now, with the latest findings of Dr. Peter Hortez, we realize that there's a new dimension to extreme poverty. ...[A]nywhere where wealthy people live... Peter finds an astonishing but mostly hidden level of poverty and suffering. He has discovered that most of the poverty-related diseases... NTDs, actually occur in the wealthiest countries and economies. ...Peter's framework... "blue marble health," means that the NTDs will be found regardless of location as long as there are places or regions where people live in desperate circumstances. ...Peter finds that if the elected leaders of the most powerful nations would simply recognize and support their own impoverished and neglected populations, a majority of our most ancient and terrible scourges could vanish. ...Currently more than a billion people live with no money and suffer from horrific NTDs. ...This must be fixed."

"My friend Dr. Peter Hotez is the world's leading authority on battling tropical diseases. Worried about Zika, Ebola, , , malaria—he is your man. ...He has tangled with the disgraced former British doctor , who promulgated a false causal link between vaccines and autism that led to many preventable cases of measles and other diseases... Hotez does this while bearing the price of threatening, hateful e-mails and tweets from Wakefield's supporters who... keep up the vaccine-autism myth despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary."

"The big pharma companies are still not going in. Some of the biotechs are starting to, because they're trying to really accelerate their technology... and hopefully to flip it around for something else that will make money. We need a new system in place."

"Peter Hotez and his wife, Ann, have an autistic daughter, Rachel. ...[W]hen anti-vaccinators impugn vaccines as the cause of autism, they... pay close attention. A man who has spent his career fighting , sometimes with vaccines, is going to be especially and appropriately concerned when vaccines are flagged over and over again as the cause of his own daughter's health issues."

"[W]e also took on, a decade ago, the interesting problem of making Coronavirus vaccines because we recognized these as enormous public health threats, and yet we have not seen the big pharma guys and the biotech's rushing into this space. So we... partnered with a group at the and the to take on the big scientific challenge of Coronavirus vaccines..."

"There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money."

"[O]ne of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of Coronavirus vaccines. ...This was first found in the early 1960s with the respiratory syncytial virus [RSV] vaccines, and it was done here in Washington with the NIH and Children's National Medical Center... [S]ome of those kids that got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe that there were two deaths in the consequence of that study. ...[W]hat happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines, you get immunized, and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon. ...[I]t's a real problem for certain respiratory virus vaccines. That killed the RSV program for decades. Now the Gates Foundation is taking it up again, but when we started developing Coronavirus vaccines (and our colleagues) we noticed in laboratory animals, that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier."

"[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly cause autism..."