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2020"No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough to cover the immensity of factuality." ---Hannah Arendt The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities."---Adrienne Rich "I have not failed... I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work." ---Thomas Edison "Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel -- or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime." ---John Keats "The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork." --- Oscar Wilde "My greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings. I'm a long way from the human being I'd liked to be, but I've decided I'm not so bad after all... I just do my thing." --- Audrey Hepburn "Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain." --- (Carson McCullers, from "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe") "I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries." ---Frank Capra John Cassavetes contemplating Frank Capra's contribution to the art of film quipped: "Maybe there really wasn't an America, it was only Frank Capra!" "The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." ---Pauline Kael There is a story that Sam Goldwyn was dining in a Hollywood restaurant with Billy Wilder, when he was accosted by a drunk demanding work. The man became so obstreperous that Goldwyn, with the aid of some of the restaurant staff, had to escort him out of the building. 'Who was that?' Wilder asked when Goldwyn resumed his seat. 'D.W. Griffith,' replied Goldwyn. ---Neil Sinyard, SILENT MOVIES, p. 173 "George Gershwin was a great friend of mine, and he had an interesting mental image of luck. He saw luck as a series of arrows hitting a road from both sides. He said: 'If you are on the road, the arrows will come. But if you are off in the fields picking daisies, the arrows won't come.'" ---Kitty Carlisle Hart "When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight that doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, and haply may forget." ---Christina Rossetti, 1862 "It was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. ---Mark Twain, ROUGHING IT, Ch. XVII "Attention to celebrity is mental illness -- the mental illness which creates that attention is tragic to me." ---Joni Mitchell Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill was raised a Catholic and has admitted to a fondness for the language of the Catholic Church. "I like the words, the distinctions they have for sins. For example, "morose delectation." Beautiful. It's the dwelling on pleasure from sins already committed. I kind of admire something that's seen so far inside the soul that it can work out names for these things. Of course, I don't believe a word of it". "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." ---Philip K. Dick "Like, we're the Beatles after all, aren't we? We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, it isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside. Is it?" ---George Harrison "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." ---Mark Twain "The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist." --- Eric Gill "Adopt the pace of nature - her secret is patience." --- Emerson "Democracy does not have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest." ---Bill Clinton "Work isn't art until enough noise is made about it, until someone rich comes along and buys it." ---Alfred Stieglitz "There is a solitude which each and every one of us has carried, more inaccessible than the ice cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea - the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call our self, no eye or touch of man or angel has ever pierced." ---Elizabeth Cady Stanton "The artist's life is the best in the world, if you can get through the first 40 years." ---Thomas Hart Benton "Don't play what you know, but what you hear." ---Miles Davis "What joy awaits discovery in the silence behind the portals of your mind no human tongue can tell." ---Yogananda "Who would want to break into the music business? It's like a bank that's already been robbed." ---Randy Newman "Not to know what happened before you were born is always to be a child." ---Cicero "London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people or the serious people produce the fogs, I do not know!" ---Oscar Wilde "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I DIDN'T sing." ---Florence Foster Jenkins On post-WW2 America, from 1945-1950: "For the first time, the US was not involved in a war. The Depression was over. Suddenly, there were 13 million of us who'd served in the military and were home. There was a cultural burst that Americans had never known before: we became number one for things like ballet. We had dozens of first-rate poets, several not so bad novelists, wonderful music, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. It was a great moment, and it lasted for five years. Then the Korean War came, and we've never stopped being at war since. ---Gore Vidal, from the IMDB "We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I used to whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel, with several red Chow dogs to match my hair. Today, they're sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun." ---Clara Bow, on Hollywood, then and now "I cannot unbuckle the Bible belt. That is why I will never write my memoirs." ---Louise Brooks, from WHY BE GOOD?: SEXUALITY & CENSORSHIP "I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it." ---Colette "It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you." ---Bob Dylan "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery." ---Charles Dickens, DAVID COPPERFIELD "It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards." ---Soren Kierkegaard "God preserve us from generalizations. There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble." --- Anton Chekhov "Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." --- F. Scott Fitzgerald "The best way to find out about a man is to have lunch with his ex-wife." --- Shelley Winters
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