Occupations

"A priest is a man who is called Father by everyone except his own children, who are obliged to call him Uncle."

"A man who is good enough to go to heaven, is good enough to be a clergyman."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"Though all good men be called God's servants in their general vocation, yet they cannot be called the minister of God but to a more special use."

"Minister doth not always import an inferior to him to whom he doth minister: for the Psalm saith, God hath made man paulo inferiorem Angelis; and yet in the first chapter to the Hebrews it is said, that the Angels are ministering spirits, sent forth for the good of God's saints."

"It is worth noting that Protestantism suppresses the clergy, and though it claims to uphold the authority of the Bible, it in fact ruins it by 'free inquiry'."

"[The priesthood] truly plays the role of 'mediator' between heaven and earth, and it is not without reason that in the Western traditions the priesthood in all its plenitude received the symbolic name of 'pontificate', for, as Saint Bernard says, 'the Pontiff, as indicated by the etymology of his name, is a kind of bridge [pont] between God and man.' If one then wished to go back to the primal origin of the priestly and royal powers, one must look to the 'celestial world'."

"CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones."

"ARCHBISHOP, n. An ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop."

"A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous...Likewise must the deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience."

"It is not the way to convert a sinner to knock him down first and then reason with him."

"Learn in Christ how possible it is to be strong and mild, to blend in fullest harmony the perfection of all that is noble, lofty, generous in the soldier's ardor of heroic devotion; and of all that is calm, still, compassionate, tender in the priest's waiting before God and mediation among men."

"Your great employment is to bring the individual souls of men to Christ."

"I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life."

"The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army is looking for fools and rebels, radicals and rascals, tricksters and traitors, mutineers and malcontents to join its ranks. You could be part of a fighting force armed with ruthless love and fully trained in the ancient art of clowning and non-violent direct action. You could learn ingeniously stupid tactics that baffle the powerful. You could uncover your inner clown and discover the subversive freedom of fooling. You don't need to like clowns or soldiers, you just need to love life and laughter as much as rebellion."

"I remain just one thing, and one thing only — and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician."

"There was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider."

"Take a look at those clowns And the tricks that they play In the circus of life Life is bitter and gay'There are clowns in the night Clowns everywhere See how they run Run from despair …"

"With both lined up four abreast, she read me the cards. Poor drunkard of the tale. Two fortune-tellers dead. And a room full of bottles. The clown is drunk. And the cards of death wait on him. His snout is blue, and he looks like a bear. And the rag doll of death, with the clown flinging him by the arm, can't be loved by you, madness. Because he is drunk and has no river, or breakdown. Because they cork him in, unable to love him. Because stars no longer love him."

"People hunger for love, and clowning is a trick to get love close. As a clown I can do things that people are too frightened of Love to allow you to do."

"You gotta believe me, Mandy! The clowns are nothing but ultimate evil! They want to be the dominant species on the planet and they’ll destroy us all to make it happen! Destroy us all! Destroy us all!"

"Don't you love farce? My fault I fear. I thought that you'd want what I want. Sorry, my dear. But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns. Don't bother, they're here."

"Isn't it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, You in mid-air. Send in the clowns."

"I don't want to be called "the greatest" or "one of the greatest". Let other guys claim to be the best. I just want to be known as a clown because to me, that's the height of my profession. It means you can do everything — sing, dance and, above all, make people laugh."

"Be a clown, be a clown, All the world loves a clown. Act the fool, play the calf, And you'll always have the last laugh."

"A clown's makeup and character, that's all he has to sell. He loves and believes in that character."

"I'm a big goofball. In Australia we call it a dag. … It's quite an affectionate term, but it means your basically a big goofball. I just love making a fool out of myself. I made my living as a clown at kids' parties for about three years."

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

"Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter."

"CIRCA aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion — adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth."

"A rule says "You must do it this way". A principle says, "This works... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the well-made play; rather it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."

"It seems to me it's the hardest thing 'cause you're starting from nothing and creating something. Everybody else is interpreting what you've written. Everybody else is an interpretive artist. Even the best of them. Stanley Kubrick was an interpretive artist. The best actors in the world are interpreting what's on the page, and they use it as a springboard to something else, but if it's not there, there's nothing to spring from. So the writer is the only person who's taking absolutely nothing, and 120 pages of it, and dirtying it up in such a way that it's gonna gross hundreds of millions of dollars and make a lot of people happy."

"Mostly, you write a script and someone’s gonna rewrite you. They get hundreds of—not hundred but they get ten writers to write something. If you have a big budget, you can go and get a lot of people to write on script .... I just actually heard that somebody said, 'Well, your screenplay got bought and now someone like Carrie Fisher will come in and rewrite you.' And I feel terrible, you know, because that’s not what I mean to do. My idea was never to raid something and trash it, you know. ‘Cause that – that’s more work for me!"

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, 'Why am I out there looking for directors?'—because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, 'I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.'"

"[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that."

"I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why – but we really need to land on that why. That’s what I’ve been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at."

"Interviewer: The book also assembles several scraps of paper, on which you wrote bits of dialogue or character development on the fly. Is that how you operate, scribbling something down whenever an idea pops into your head?"

"This...is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck."

"Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers "Schmucks with Underwoods," but 20 years earlier Irving Thalberg … said, "The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it.""

"The people who make movies are actually desperate for good material. They’re desperate. And honestly if you write a brilliant script they really wouldn’t care if you were a 95-year-old grandmother from Duluth. They really want something that’s brilliant on the page. And it’s actually one of the main reasons that I chose it, is that it’s very subject to elbow grease, subject to hard work."

"In the 80’s and much of the 90’s, [[w:Joe Eszterhas|[Joe] Eszterhas]] was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film’s director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren’t. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. “You like to play games, don’t you?” was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once."

"Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do."

"The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen."

"In the specialist culture of our bureaucratic-industrial age, the reliance on experts to interpret and evaluate inner life is in itself the most malignant and invasive reach of division of labor."

"Psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man."

"The mysteries revealed by the psychoanalysts have been equally agreeable to those in rebellion against the behaviorists, who seemed to be occupied with nothing more spiritual than pulling habits out of rats."

"Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large."

"Economists have never allowed their analysis to be influenced by psychologists of their time, but have always framed for themselves such assumptions about psychical processes as they have thought it desirable to make."

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important."

"It is a principle of modern psychology that the feelings most apt to influence behavior are those that we try hardest to suppress. They work like malicious secret agents in the shadowed corners of the psyche. The basic strategy of every school of psychology is therefore to recover the repressed, to shine the light of awareness upon all that is hidden so that its influence can be assessed and allowed for. This amounts to saying that honesty—a clear declaration of one's tastes, preferences, vested interests, and emotional involvement—may be more important than objecitivity, if by objectivity one means affecting a blank and neutral state. In the latter sense objectivity may be a pretense that hides profound distortions."