People From New York City

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"Marty was a comment on the social values of our times."

"There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle."

"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?""

"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."

"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."

"CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places."

"MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John."

"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."

"DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . ."

"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"

"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."

"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?"

"Jon Stewart: But I can show you a prediction that's wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, King of Wrong Mountain. And it concerns accountability for pundits. Dick Morris (clip): Romney's going to win. He's going to win by, I believe, more than 5 points. I believe he's going to get more than 300 electoral votes. Dick Morris (clip): You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are. Jon Stewart: No, you won't and they won't. Nobody will, because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning-free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in musical chairs, when the music stops, nobody ever moves the chair. They just keep adding more chairs."

"It should come as no surprise that President Obama will raise taxes if he is reelected. But here's the shocker: he will invite the United Nations to tax Americans directly. And the proceeds would go directly to the Third World."

"We're going to win by a landslide. It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle the whole question on why the media played this race as a nailbiter where in fact Romney's going to win by quite a bit."

"Bill O'Reilly: Do you realize if President Obama wins, you're through? Dick Morris: I'm through. Bill O'Reilly: Yeah, you're gonna be— You'll be selling refrigerators in Topeka."

"The first primary, the one against Bachmann, would be held in Iowa, where Bachmann is probably gonna win, and Perry could be competitive."

"Particularly if the Republicans nominate a more moderate candidate such as Mitt Romney, Obama will not be able to rely on partisan animosity to succeed where job approval has failed. And, given all that, he might not even run."

"Dick Morris: Look, I believe that -- and I've said this before and everybody either gives a sigh of a relief or a cynical laugh — there is no chance that Obama will get re-elected. Sean Hannity: I don't agree that's true. I think it's possible. Dick Morris: Zilch, none, zip, nada."

"Where he's wrong is that we went into Iraq at the invitation of the government, not as an invasion."

"Mike Gallagher: Hey Dick Morris, you sound intrigued by a Donald Trump candidacy. Dick Morris: Oh I am. I am. I take him very seriously. I think he's going to run, I think he's got a good shot at the nomination, and I think if he were nominated, he could beat Obama."

"No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq."

"If I went to the pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else."

"I don't want to sneer, but old habits die hard. It's the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it's too hot, it's too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower."

"I ate the sandwich."

"If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery."

"They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them."

"I hoped I might become a debonair, hard-drinking, poetic Irishman like him. I'd be a New York character. I'd set the table on a roar and dominate the bars of Greenwich Village with song and story. At the Lion’s Head Bar I drank whiskey after whiskey to give myself the courage to be colorful. Bartenders suggested I slow down. Friends said they didn't understand a word coming out of my mouth. They lifted me out of the bar and into a taxi, paid the driver and told him to drive nonstop till I reached my door."

"If you don't settle down to something very soon you’ll be forty and wondering where your life went. She pointed to the people all around us, happily married, productive, settled, content, having children, developing mature relationships, looking to the future, going on nice vacations, joining clubs, taking up golf, growing old together, visiting relatives, dreaming of grandchildren, supporting their churches, thinking of retirement. I agreed with her but I couldn't admit it. I gave her a sermon on life and America. I told her life was an adventure, and maybe I was living in the wrong century."

"I wanted to be the Great Liberating Teacher, to raise them from their knees after days of drudgery in office and factories, to help them cast off their shackles, to lead them to the mountaintop, to breathe the air of freedom. Once their minds were clear of cant, they’d see me as a savior."

"But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me."

"I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?"

"No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish."

"I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family."

"Remember, if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You're with them, day in, day out, and you'll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it’s bye-bye teacher, nice knowin' you, my sister's gonna be in your class in September. But there’s something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep your fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forgot how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at your like you just arrived from another planet and they're right."

"I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library [...]."