Jews From The United States

"As actors it is easy for us to play the hero. We get to fight the bad guys and stand up for justice. In real life, the choices are not always so clear. The Hollywood Blacklist, recreated powerfully on screen in Trumbo, was a time I remember well. The choices were hard. The consequences were painful and very real. During the blacklist, I had friends who went into exile when no one would hire them; actors who committed suicide in despair. My young co-star in Detective Story (1951), Lee Grant, was unable to work for twelve years after she refused to testify against her husband before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I was threatened that using a Blacklisted writer for Spartacus –– my friend Dalton Trumbo — would mark me as a “Commie-lover” and end my career. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I am so proud of my fellow actors who use their public influence to speak out against injustice. At 98 years old, I have learned one lesson from history: It very often repeats itself. I hope that Trumbo, a fine film, will remind all of us that the Blacklist was a terrible time in our country, but that we must learn from it so that it will never happen again."

"On working with in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); as quoted in Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2003) by Leslie Halliwell (ed. John Walker), p. 468"

"Jo wanted to be pumped up before she went on to do a scene, she asked me to slap her... They did the scene over and over, never quite right. Every time she came over to me and asked me to hit her, and hit her harder."

"I love champions. A champion has something special about him."

"I told him, "Michael, you're the kind of producer I'd like to work with because you give everything to the other person even when you're in the movie." He did that in Romancing the Stone (1984). He focused all the attention on the girl Kathleen Turner. I haven't been that generous. I've been a producer, but I find a product like Spartacus or The Vikings or Seven Days in May or Paths of Glory and somehow there always seems to be a good part for me."

"I grew up, you know, in a generation of war novels and macho—Hemingway’s being the most prominent."

"When we test out our own insights on how other people might feel, the testing ground is ourselves. Our views on anything from politics to landscape are tinctured with our personality."

"That’s the wonder of the English language. That its words can alternate between rough and soft, harsh and sweet. And, best of all maybe, short and long."

"I know by now that I don’t care to be an accepted habitué of any one world. That’s part of being a writer too. Wanting out. From the role-playing. Except on the page."

"(You graduated when you were seventeen, and shortly left the household to work and live on your own. Yet you weren’t to publish for twenty years. How come? Still fear?) HC: Not really. Circumstance. First off, I came out into the great world. Of the Depression, then. I’d already worked in department stores. That’s a very instructive milieu—of what I call “business dreams” and artificiality all mixed. But then I was plunged into the starvation world. The word poverty doesn’t say it hard enough. As a welfare visitor—investigator, they called us—I saw homes, heard tales that still make me shiver. The whole seamy side of the happy U.S. It changed my life. As it would one day haunt what I wrote."

"As for complication—or complexity—it excites me."

"I couldn’t write those first stories about them until they were all dead. That’s when I began. (It was an unusual family.) Well, I’d paraphrase Tolstoy: All families are. All people too, probably; all places. That’s in part what sends me to writing stories—to balance out the usual and the unusual in the life I see."

"I don’t think artists can compete—except as to money and prizes, and, of course, status. Which may be temporary. But not on the page. Or the canvas or the stone. Or the musical score. All you can hope to be is worthy of the company you respect."

"I think such middle-class backgrounds, where the bourgeois only sniffs at art or intellect, often produce artists. A child born to them smells the difference—as I did."

"out in what I knew damn well was the real world—of literature and everything else—my agony was how to begin. (How do you?) You begin. (What had held you back?) Fear."

"what I have written—and how I came to write it—is most powerfully what I am."

"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose."

"The only famous Yiddish stories from Latin America I'm able to make people invoke are the handful of ones by the masters Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They are set in, or at least refer to, Argentina (and on occasion in an eternally rainy Brazil) and invariably deal with the Jewish prostitution ring-la trata de blancas."

"the great Sholem Asch never sees women as they really are, but rather as he would like them to be, that is, saintly and self-sacrificing. Her heart overflowing with love, the Yiddish literary heroine is ready to throw away her life for the man she loves and the people she loves. Asch's favourite female type is the mother. As is well-known, Asch suffered from a mother-fixation, a fixation that leads him to the apotheosis of all mother figures in the novel Mary, the third volume of his Christian trilogy. Even in earlier work - for instance, Kiddush-Hashem and "The Sorceress of Castille" - Asch describes his heroines, Dvora and Jephta, as if they were Jewish versions of the Virgin Mary. But Asch never shows us the human complexity that troubles his heroines' souls. In fact, in the course of the entire narrative of "The Sorceress of Castille," Jephta does not utter a single word."

"Considering the world scene in this light, one can say with certainty that if Lenin had not succeeded in carrying through the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and power had remained in the weak, half-traitorous hands of Russian Social Democracy, a Russian Hitler and a Russian Nazism would have arisen a decade earlier than in Germany. There would have been no Red Army to destroy Nazism and fascism today. The world is only now beginning to enjoy the fruit of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It is thanks only to the Bolshevik Revolution that the world will arise cleansed of Hitler, even if wounded and bloody."

"Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer reflected through the prism of their personalities and unique talents the soul of the jew as a human being, and in this way they became universal writers."

"In the terrible revolutionary upheaval in the Jewish towns of Russia at the beginning of this century, when the entire Jewish youth was drawn into the vortex and confusion of strife, Asch remained loyal to his art. Not that he was indifferent to the momentous events, not that those terrible days failed to stir his soul and heat his blood. Nay, he saw all, he absorbed and responded. But this he did not as a worker, not as a participant in the struggle, not as a zealot, or a believer or soldier; but as the artist, as the dreamer, philosopher and interpreter and painter of emotions and impressions. This is also true of his attitude to the agitation over the Jewish problem that shook Russian Judaism in those days of storm and unrest. The questions of Zionism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, the revival of Palestinism, the amalgamation of national and revolutionary principles, the neo-chassidism, these and many other creeds that sprang into life during those memorable days influenced Asch not as a crusader for one cause or the other, but as an interpreter of them all, as an artist purely and faithfully."

"The joy and hope which the Red Army marching forward calls forth in the hearts of the tortured masses, also throws fear and dread into the enemy's heart, into the hearts of the fascists of all colors, into the hearts of all the debased human worms who have the sorry courage to aid fascism, to give it comfort, to whitewash it and to deliver into its hands the fate of the Jewish masses. Woe to such misleaders!"

"Suffering, my son, is the fount of love. Suffering is the grace, the great grace, which our Father in heaven pours down upon us. For suffering gives men submissive hearts. He that does not suffer thinks that he stands upon a mighty rock which he himself has raised. He does not see his brother; he sees only himself. He believes in no one; he believes only in his own strength. His heart becomes a swamp which swarms with reptiles: pride, obstinacy, and self-love. And when his footstool is rolled away from under him, he sinks, together with all the reptiles, into the depths of hell. But he to whom God has granted suffering shall find his pains like ropes which bind him to his Father in heaven. His heart is awake to feel the pains of his brother in need. He sends afflictions upon you and makes you small on earth that you may be great in heaven."

"The masses have learned the great lesson of what happens to an ideal when traitors abandon it to the enemy. German Social Democracy, Noske and Hitler, will forever stand before the eyes of the people like black shadows to teach them in whose hands to entrust power."

"We also organized Vietnamese Life. Vietnamese Life was like a teach-in through artists and writers. Everybody did something that would teach about Vietnamese life. Wally Zuckerman, who used to make harpsichords in the Village, did a Vietnamese forest symphony. Writers like Hortense Calisher read Vietnamese stories. [Avant-garde playwright] Maria Irena Fornes did The Vietnamese Wedding, which later became a play."

"The page isn’t all of my life. It’s what I offer from it."

"When an idea, summoned by need and discontent, fails to be realized, an alien dark force, conceived by the devil, arrives and bestially throws itself into the void left by the ideal. It utilizes the despair created by the unrealized ideal, often operates with the same phrases, sows the same hopes until it wins over the deceived masses to its side. Like Satan, it stands upon the structure erected by the ideal, to usurp power. A clear example of this is the rise of Hitlerism in Germany. Nazism was made ripe by the leadership of German Social Democracy which had failed to fulfill its duty towards the embittered German masses. If German Social Democracy had used the power which bankrupt German Junkerdom so completely delivered over to it, if German Social Democracy had realized the revolutionary program which it had preached for generations, Hitler could not have deceived the German masses with a promise that he would realize the program in his own manner."

"American critics and scholars don’t emendate writers who are women—until we’re well dead. Generally speaking, the pejorative for a woman who writes complexly is “obscure.” A man who is “obscure” however, may well be “profound” and merit interpretation."

"(What’s the sensation of writing?) HC: A sense of power and surprise when it’s going well. But always obsessive hope, as you pace an almost familiar terrain. (Surprise at what?) HC: At what can happen under your hand. When the whole becomes greater than the parts. But the real surprise is afterward. When I see that the book has made its own rules. Each one in the end makes its own form."

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

"I think all artists, even the great ones, are combinations of arrogance and innocence. As life goes on we may lose one or the other in some proportion. To function best one must have both. Once I began to write, though, I learned that the ambition can only phrase itself in the book. There’s such an enormous difference in the writer being, and the writer doing."

"I don’t want the critic head taking over, as it quickly can. But it can be instructive. I discover what I think about literature. And critique by other writers is the best literary talk."

"I think you write better about women if you don’t write about women exclusively. As with any subject."

"I am more interested in wars of the mind."

"I think of myself as a person—after that as a woman. If one doesn’t, one narrows oneself. And the world...I think it’s ultimately foolish of us to resegregate ourselves. The strengths of sisterhood are possible without that. And the work itself can be as much from the dower of what we are as women as we want it to be."

"At their best they’re our moral health—and our hope."

"The subject dictates the approach. I don’t consult with myself beforehand. It happens."

"Motherhood has no firm curriculum, but it can make you mechanically minded, and it can connect you firmly to physical life."

"But you are a feminist, aren’t you? HC: Born. But not orthodox. And the writer part comes first. I’d never write propaganda."

"Within the past ten years there have appeared with increasing frequency books, articles, conferences, and monograms dealing with system engineering, system analysis, system design, the systems approach, the design of systems, system theory, and problems of systems engineering. The number of publications and the stature of their authors does not allow the dismissal of the subject as a passing fad. The breadth of engineering activity involved in even a cursory examination of recent publications is of interest... It is therefore obvious that whatever Systems Engineering may or may not be, it is non-sectarian and encompasses activities that are of concern in all phases of engineering. On the other hand undergraduate college offerings akin to Systems Engineering are rather limited and even graduate programs are not extensive."

"Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It's okay, I'm from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, “Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey.”"

"And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up."

"There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came."

"I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks."

"Wednesday (as Pocahontas): You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller." Becky (as Sarah Miller): Gary, she's changing the words! Wednesday (as Pocahontas): And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."

"1. If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, I would like someone to turn off the TV."

"While Peggy and I lived in Los Angeles, we made some interesting friends [after 1944]... There was also Allen Rosenstein, a young professor of electrical engineering from UCLA who belonged to a group associated with the American Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.... My association with Allen Rosenstein, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and president of Pioneer Magnetics, led me in 1985 to a USAID project in the Caribbean and to a two-and-a-half-year consulting role with Coopers & Lybrand as a part of President Reagan's Caribbean initiative."

"[Allen Rosenstein was a principal investigator with a Reports Group from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.] A first step in the UCLA project was to determine how designs are actually carried out. The group under Allen Rosenstein, was charged with investigating design. They interviewed some forty designers; people from all kinds of industries, petroleum, aeronautical, construction, electronics, etc. It was found that individuals who did design tended to follow a certain pattern, but they did not do it consciously."

"The pressure to generate the ideas and methods attributed to Systems Engineering stems directly from the needs of 20th century society. As our frontiers have disappeared, man has turned to technology to furnish the "good life" in a rapidly shrinking, crowded world. Our interdependence upon one another has increased in direct proportion to the population increase. The race to maintain or improve the operating efficiency of society has required that the systems and mechanisms that serve the society also become increasingly complex and interdependent. Goode and Machal have provided statistics to illustrate the above. They note that the world population increased from 800 million in 1750, to 1200 million in 1850, and 2400 million in 1950. Maximum transportation speeds went from 40 mph in 1850, and 100 mph in 1900, to commercial transport speed of 350 mph in 1950 and supersonic transport planes of over 1200 mph in the 1960's. Our communication systems are a good indication of increasing complexity. U.S. telephones jumped from 350,000 in 1900, to 55 million in 1955."