Comedians From The United States

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"How My Egoism Died"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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.’"

"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."

"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."

"All I'm saying is, if you celebrate Festivus, you may live a little longer. You are getting back to the essentials, to the days of gods on mountaintops and howling wolves. Because you are saying the holidays are in the heart, a celebration of being alive with our fellow humans. For that purpose, an aluminum pole will do just as well as anything else — as long as it's not stuck in the wrong place."

"For some people the revelation comes too late that life is best kept to the essentials. Some people are given their last rites and that person might say in their last breath, "I should have celebrated Festivus.""

"In the ancient days when gods played their own games, and had their own celebrations, tossing lightning bolts between mountaintops, hurling great boulders — Festivus came out of that. It's a holiday that celebrates being alive at a time when it was hard to be alive. There was no Christ yet, no Yahweh, no Buddha. There were great ruins and raw nature. But there was a kindling spark of hope among men. They celebrated that great thunderous storms hadn't enveloped them in the past year, that landslides hadn't destroyed them. They made wishes that their crops would grow in the fields, that they'd have food the next year and the wild animals wouldn't attack and eat them. There's something pure about Festivus, something primal, raw in the hearts of humans."

"Bill Nye [is] executive director of the Planetary Society, the Pasadena, Calif.-based nonprofit that advocates for space exploration."

"Nye grew up in a science-minded family in Washington, D.C. His mom was a math and science whiz. His dad manufactured sundials. His grandfather was an organic scientist. Fittingly, one of young Bill’s favorite hangouts was the original Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which looked like a small Quonset hut."

"Nye, a mechanical engineer who once worked for Boeing Co., is best known for his PBS TV science show that ran from 1993 to 1998. He made science entertaining. He still does as a science educator."

"If you could invent a better battery, one that can store more energy using less exotic metal, one that could handle the heat without loss of performance or just plain catching on fire, we could store energy from the wind and the Sun and have it available whenever we need it. You would change the world all right. You might also get rich – crazy rich!"

"He eventually quit his day job as an engineer to focus on comedy writing and performing. The decision led to the creation of 'Bill Nye the Science Guy,' which won 28 Emmys in five years. He also won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing and producing."

"A graduate of Cornell University, Nye began his career as an engineer. In fact, Boeing still uses his hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor today."

"Nye developed his character 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' while living in Seattle and working on the comedy show 'Almost Live.'"

"Nye, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University, combined his love of science with his flair for comedy when he won a Steve Martin look-alike contest in Seattle."

"He has a cult following among science teachers."

"It's his gift. He makes science understandable and fun, and he knows how to connect with people."

"By the mid-1990s he had his own television show, 'Bill Nye the Science Guy,' which was shot entirely in Seattle. Nye and his show won several Emmys."

"Nye has been instrumental in making science fun for preteen audiences‚ but when he is speaking at a collegiate venue he focuses more on topics he’s serious about."

"Nye worked for Boeing from 1977 through most of 1980, but left to take a position as a licensed mechanical engineer for the state of Washington."

"In 1992, Nye began doing his own show, 'Bill Nye , the Science Guy,' on PBS. The series' 100 shows produced four Emmys for Nye in eight seasons before he began developing other interests, such as doing short documentaries for the Discovery Channel. His latest production, 'The 100 Greatest Discoveries,' is currently airing on the Science Channel."

"Nye is a former Boeing engineer whose name (besides meaning 'new' in Danish) has become synonymous with wacky popular science ever since he became a cast member on KING/5's now defunct late-night comedy show, 'Almost Live.'"

"Nye, who grew up in Washington, D.C., graduated from Cornell University in 1977 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was lured to the West Coast by Boeing and made an immediate and significant contribution, designing a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor for their 747s."

"Bill Nye is many things: comedian, scientist, author, inventor, TV personality."

"Nye, a Cornell University graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering, studied under the late astronomer Carl Sagan."

"His latest television series is called 'Eyes of Nye'" Lately, Nye has focused considerable attention on environmental science."

"Nye has won numerous daytime Emmy Awards and has been named outstanding performer in a children's series."

"How could there be billions of stars more distant than 6,000 years, if the world is only 6,000 years old?"

"I just want to remind us all there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, who get enriched by the wonderful sense of community by their religion. But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view that the Earth is somehow only 6,000 years old."

"If we continue to eschew science ... we are not going to move forward. We will not embrace natural laws. We will not make discoveries. We will not invent and innovate and stay ahead."

"We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

"Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not gonna get the right answer. Your whole world is just gonna be — a mystery. Instead of an exciting place."