A Work in Progress - Clues to the MF RS Interview

Appendix “E” - “Wish I’d Said That”

So here’s a pretty fair representation of what I provided Dr. S. from “Wish I’d Said That,” and I don’t know, maybe a little, shall we say, overlap with the Rolling Stone interview. To paraphrase George Costanza, “It’s not stealing, if you believe it.”

Groucho
"Whatever it is, I’m against it."

Bruce Springsteen in an interview with Charlie Rose, 1998
“And our job – the way we create our lives is by sorting those things out and sorting them through. That’s how we honor our parents and honor the people who’ve taught us, you know, is in divining our own path and our own road through the things that they handed down, both the good things and the bad, you know? That’s essential. That’s how you find yourself and get to your place in the world.”

Gil Scott-Heron’s Producer on the musician’s time in prison, Rolling Stone, June 23, 2011
“The first time I met him, he was at Riker’s for possession. I said, ‘You aren’t complaining much.’ He said, ‘If you complain, no one wants to hang out with you.”

Zach Galifianikis, Rolling Stone, June 23, 2011
“Inappropriateness is funny to me. I’m in awe of the idea of being so clueless that you’re disrespectful to another human being.”

“You know when you see sensitive kids, how things just affect them? That was me.”

Coach Jim Harbaugh on Stanford Quarterback Andrew Luck, Sports Illustrated, June 13, 2011
“The cool thing about Andrew is that he makes himself small, and builds up everyone else around him. Of course, by doing that, he makes himself huge.”

Jeff Bridges, Esquire, May 2011
"We're here for such a short period of time. Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you."

Kid Rock, Esquire, May 2011
"One thing I found out for sure in life is, don't hang out with assholes. Surround yourself with good people. Whether they're the best or not, people are capable of learning if they've got good hearts and they're good souls."

"You know you got the devil on this shoulder and you got the angel on this shoulder? When I'm on the road, this motherfucker never says nothing."

Steven Tyler, Rolling Stone, May 12, 2011
“Whoever I am, or think I am, whoever you think I am, maybe I’m not that guy.”

Fenton Bailey, director of “Becoming Chaz,” NYT, May 8, 2011
“I like things that are incomplete. Life is unresolvedness.”

Of Former Major Leaguer and National League President Bill White, NYT, April 3, 2011
Former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent: "Bill once told me 'I have a terrible problem with authority. I've never been able to get along with anyone in authority.' I think that explains a lot."

Matthew McConaughey, Esquire, April 2011
"A friend of mine said...'you're into commas. Every time you think you've stopped you always come out of it. Every time you think you've reached the end of that long dead-end street, you slip around the edge, past that stopping point, past the right angles,' and I thought: Yes, it's all continuation! Even if you're dying, that's a kind of continuation, because you move on. And you have to change. Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: there was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it."

Rainn Wilson on his Baha'i faith, Esquire, April 2011

"Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race, to grow and mature. Of course he allows suffering."

Howard Stern, Rolling Stone, March 31, 2011

"I definitely want to connect, but I don't want to connect fully. I want interaction but at a safe distance. I can only get so messy with people."

"There is an anger inside of me. Once in a while, I can douse it with some water, but it just never goes away. I don't know how to get rid of that. I had something to prove to the world, to my father, to every woman that never fucked me...I'm not saying I'm fully evolved now. I'm not Buddha...I get competitive. But that's no way to live. I'm tired of walking around angry. It's a burden. And that's why I'm trying to find balance."

Donald Sutherland, Esquire, March 2011
"The spirit of mankind is not going to help me through my death. My death is a lonely little journey that I'll take myself."

"Dalton Trumbo? He wrote 'Johnny Got His Gun.' He was one of the blacklisted writers. Spent time in prison. Lost everything. Got everything back. Wonderful fellow. The last thing he said to me was 'Don't forget to be happy.'"

Mario Andrett, GQ, February, 2011
“”If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

Aaron Sorkin, Esquire, January, 2011
"The rules are all in a 64-page pamphlet by Aristotle called Poetics. It was written almost 3,000 years ago, but I promise you if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules."

"I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That's one reason I overtip. I love when the skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me."

"I kind of worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something's standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to go to Philadelphia - doesn't matter. And if they can need it, that's even better...The obstacle has to be difficult to overcome. And that's the clothesline that you hang everything on - the tactics by which your characters try to achieve their goal. That's the story you end up telling."

"When you're a hit, you get a little more elbow room and you walk with a bigger stick."

"A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room."

"By the way, you don't have to necessarily always enjoy being with your friends. It's possible to have friends that drive you out of your mind. Don't you have friends that you've had since you were a little kid? And you constantly have to explain to people who're just meeting him: 'I've known him since the fifth grade. He really is a good guy. Trust me. Really, he's got a heart as big as Montana."

"I feel like if I'd gotten married once a year, every year since I was 25, there would never have been the same five groomsmen twice. Two new people would always be coming in."

On New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, NYT, January 2011
“Marty believes in loyalty above all. [Like in Saul Bellow’s Herzog]: ‘It’s all potato love. If he’s loyal to you, there is almost nothing you can do to lose that love. This strikes some people as blind or even destructive, but it is also beautiful.”

“Marty needs conflict in his life. When things are going smoothly, he’ll gratuitously start an argument – as though this is what he needs to feel alive again.”

Mary-Louise Parker, Esquire, January, 2011
"I'd rather have to put my teeth in a jar at the end of the day than Twitter."

"Running from something and running to something are the same thing."

"I like to pretend that I'm a tough guy. It's kind of an admission of defeat if I have to ask for help - or even kindness. But if it doesn't come, at some point I snap and demand it."

"I like to restructure the rules to make them fit my own needs."

Ted Danson, Esquire, January, 2011
"A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me.”

Robert DeNiro, Esquire, January, 2011

"Those who say, don't know. Those who know, don't say. That holds up over time."

Robert Redford, Esquire, January, 2011

"I was in a small charter plane...and the engines went out for nine minutes. You go through that checklist. Then you get down to what it's gonna feel like. What's it gonna feel like? I still wonder."

"I grew up in a pretty cynical environment. All my friends gave each other a horribly hard bad time. We'd destroy each other with criticisms, but for me it was a sign of friendship. If someone gave me a hard time, I'd say, 'Well, I guess he's my friend.'"

"Life is essentially sad. Happiness is sporadic. It comes in moments and that's it. Extract the blood from every moment."

"Speak out for what you believe and what you feel. Or don't. You have to live with yourself."

Jimmy Fallon, Rolling Stone, January 20, 2011
“You always want to do what you’re not good at.”

Wavy Gravy, Rolling Stone, December 10, 2010
“I’m in it for the buzz. When you get to the bottom of the human soul. And you are sinking, and somebody else is sinking worse than you and you reach down there to help them, that’s when everybody gets high.”

Mick Jagger, NYT, December 5, 2010
"I don't really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be. I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don't really think much of marriage. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful thing and people shouldn't do it, but it's not for me."

"Secretariat" Director Randall Wallace, NYT, November 7, 2010
"Horses, I think, are similar to women. They want to be admired and appreciated more than they want to be understood. They are magnificent, mysterious animals. And they're also dangerous; you have to take great care."

Keith Richards, Rolling Stone, November 11, 2010
"I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid with Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things."

'Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point....Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's can you hang, can you talk about this without feeling any distance between you? Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world. Mick doesn't like to trust anybody. I'll trust you until you prove you're not trustworthy.

Bruce Springsteen, NYT, November 7, 2010

"The only thing I was always nervous about was not living up to what my potential might be."

Jon Hamm's Character Don Draper on Mad Men, October 2010

To his secretary while breaking open a bottle: "Make sure I don't over do it."

"Ok, how do I [know when that is]...it's hard to tell with you"

Roger Waters, September 30, 2010

“All of the pushing away of people that went on in my young life and all the aggression and all of the spikiness and difficulty all came from the fact that I was absolutely terrified every waking moment of being found out, of people discovering that I wasn’t who I wanted to be. I had built this wall that I then described in theatrical terms around myself.”

From Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO’s “Bored to Death”

Ted Danson’s character: “I can’t die. I haven’t figured anything out yet.”

Zach Galifianakis’ character: “People think I don’t feel things. Truth is, I feel everything.”

Garry Shandling, GQ, October 2010
"You want to know what the world is about? No one knows what to think. If we could just embrace not knowing for a second, we might have a chance. It's all right not to know."

"I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me. I've talked to a therapist, I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is: that I'm a Sagittarius."

"My [boxing] trainer said 'You have an unusual rhythm of your own that's sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you because they can't figure you out.' So sometimes when I'm in the ring, it's like you can't tell whether I'm about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can't read me. They come in close - just like when an audience leans in. And then I have a flurry."

Judd Apatow: "He always talked about how it's incredibly rare for people to say what they mean. People are lying a great deal of the time. [The Larry Sanders Show was about] what people are trying to project versus that they're actually feeling."

Arrested Development Creator Mitch Hurwitz on Will Arnett, GQ, September, 2010

“Will is like a child who's forced to act like a man wrapped in the body of a man who acts like a child."

Sylvester Stallone, GQ, September, 2010

"I just know it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to end up in a very cold, dark place. I don't believe that we go anyplace. You make your heaven and hell right here, and you are what you leave behind. But don't think that you're going to change anything; you're not."

"[For my tombstone] I'd like to use a line from one of the movies. Like 'it's not how hard you hit, it's how hard you can get hit that makes all the difference in your life.'...I really feel the survivors are the ones with good jaws. Not everyone has a punch, but if you can keep taking it, quite often you can prevail."

"I didn't have a perfect childhood, but I'm a believer in this too: I wouldn't be here with a perfect childhood. So whatever trials and tribulations, it provided me with enough ammunition and anger and competitiveness and insecurity to keep forging ahead. So I tell people to embrace your frustration, your fears, because that's what makes life interesting. Nobody likes perfection; I want that flawed guy. He's there in spite of the flaws. And the hurts never go away. You can't get rid of memory."

Matt Weiner, Creator of Mad Men, Rolling Stone, September 16, 2010

"Who am I? It's only the biggest theme in all of Western literature."

"Life's not fair. You get to a certain point where you're too old to be saying that, but it never stops being infuriating. No matter how much you rise to the level of a Don Draper, you never outgrow the temptation to escape into somebody else's identity."

"Mad Men is a constructed world for me to talk about how I feel about the world, for me to talk about my family, talk about my parents, talk about my fantasies, see my wish fulfillments, trash my enemies, vanquish my fears."

Oliver Stone, NYT, September TBD, 2010

"I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken."

Robert Plant, NYT, September 5, 2010,

"I don't need to go anywhere I've been before. I keep ducking and weaving. Every time I do something else, I have no idea if it's going to work or where it's going to take me. I do it for the right reasons and continue to change as vividly as I did in that other band. I couldn't just go back to the mother lode and hit the same button every time."

Larry King, Esquire, September, 2010

"The three greatest words in the English language are not 'I love you'...[they] are: 'Leave me alone.'"

"When you get to my age you shouldn't have to do what you don't want to do."

Chuck Berry, Rolling Stone, September, 2010

Berry says he has been racing to write down as many of his ideas and thoughts about his favorite subjects - life, mathematics, philosophy and sexuality - as he can. "Nobody's going to know what I think after I'm gone. It's over with. So if I put my thoughts in the computer, somebody will take care of it."

"I'm a millionaire, but I cut the grass, and each time I cut it, it's my grass. And that is satisfying. [Every blade of grass tells a story, he says]. It's like a person. A blade is a blade. When it's cut in half, it dies for sure. But the half that isn't cut springs back to life."

"I play a slot machine and the day before yesterday I had four jackpots. I was sitting there waiting to see if i could get five. Now if that's greedy, I'm greedy. Like, I wonder if there's anything beyond raising the roof on a show. Is there more? And if so, I want to try!"

Where most people expect to see their whole lives or a vivid memory flash through their minds when they die, Berry says that won't be the case with him. "I wouldn't be having a memory. I would want to know what's next."

Dale Earnhardt, Jr., NYT, August 8, 2010

One of Earnhardt's greatest problems at Hendrick Motorsports has been his inability to communicate to his crew chief what's happening when his car during a race so his crew can make adjustments during pit stops. At DEI he was in a cocoon of family and friends who intuited his monosyllabic responses. According to Lance McGrew, Jimmie Johnson breaks down his car's handling down into 10 sections going into a corner. Dale's more old school. He'll just say, 'It's loose.' I have to prod him. He's not analytical. He doesn't relay what he thinks in words. When something's bothering him, I can see it in his driving. It gets snatchier, he's not as smooth on the throttle or brakes."

Leonardo DiCaprio, Rolling Stone, August 5, 2010

"It's crazy how your mind will become this database to make you worry about things that are so arbitrary. I have a well organized life and I've put a lot of thought into the things that I do, and then you know, my stomach will be - I'll just be sitting there, totally anxious about something ridiculous. You have to stop yourself during the day and say 'It's just not worth it.'"

"If you have the ability to convince somebody of something that you don't necessarily think is the case, it's a valuable asset. Not that I'm, like, a pathological liar, but we spend most of the day not fully being honest, you know?"

"In the movie Zebraland, there's a guy that talks a lot of trash, and a girl says, 'Why do you speak so loud? and he goes 'To be heard,' and I thought 'Wow, that's me when i was little.' I needed to be heard, and I was too little to get any respect."

"There's some insane statistic that 70 percent of people believe in angels. I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic. What I honestly think about is the planet, not my specific spiritual soul floating around. I know that sounds slightly eco-boy, but I think about the idea that there's going to be a mass extinction, and then something else is going to evolve."

Of Manager Bobby Cox, SI, July 26, 2010

"If you tracked down any of his players from those days, they would say the same thing all the other players did. They would say Bobby Cox was the best manager they ever had - showering them with praise in public, gently correcting them in private, cheering for them when nobody else would, fiercely defending them from every conceivable danger. They would help you create a composite sketch of Bobby Cox, and when it was done he would look remarkably like the perfect father."

Jon Favreau - Esquire, July 2010

"My grandfather always said he didn't care when he got ripped off for money. He said he was most offended when somebody took his time. I didn't understand that at first. But I do now."

"You tend to gravitate to the things you grew up with. So i like Carvel even though it might not be a gourmet ice cream. I just had it with someone...He said 'this is what you were craving?' Yeah because you grew up with it and and you live it."

On Helen Hunt, NYT, July 10, 2010

"I've long admired Helen as an actor who seemed kind of warm but kind of dark, kind of wry and mischievous but also kind of somber, and who can swing back and forth between those places."

Patti Smith - Offbeat, June 2010

"Religion almost implies rules and regulations. Spirituality doesn't imply rules and regulations, but religion is like a club; that's why i don't have a religion. I like churches, I like going into them, I pray, I draw comfort from them, I draw comfort from my prayers, but I don't want to be in any club and I don't want to have a bunch of guidelines for behavior or the way I'm supposed to pray or how much money I'm supposed to give so I don't have a religion."

On surfer Clay Marzo, - Rolling Stone, April 15, 2010

Author: "When your own father misconceives you so badly, how can you hope that strangers will understand?"

"From his father: "He never really shared much or let you in, but I figured that was who Clay was."

Frank DeFord - SI - March 29, 2010

"[SI's managing director Andre Laguerre] was a fascinating paradox: He was almost constitutionally withdrawn, but among the friends he chose he was magnetic."

Jeff Bridges, Rolling Stone, February 18, 2010

"The kind of acting that I admire is where you can't see the wheels turning. People in real life don't try to show their feelings - they show them inadvertently."

"I prefer coming from an underdog position. Always. I don't like to say, 'Hey look what I'm going to do for you.'"

Larry David's character Boris in Woody Allen's "Whatever Works," 2009

"People make life so much worse than it has to be, and believe me it's a nightmare without their help."

"My story is: whatever works, as long as you don't hurt anybody."

Jerry Lee Lewis, Esquire, January 2010

"I still got pretty hair. I'm still rocking. That's sitting on top of the world about as high as you're going to get."

Ornette Coleman, Esquire, January 2010

"The difference between sex and love...You're not always sure you're in love. But when you're having sex, there's really no mistaking it."

"I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure."

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke."

"How is it that something you care for would not let you love it?"

Sting, Esquire, January 2010

"I had a pretty miserable childhood but would I want to change it? No. Childhood made me who I am, and I'm quite happy with who I am. Without my childhood, something else would have happened."

James Spader, Esquire, January 2010

"I like to be wrong. I like to find something new."

Ted Danson's Character George on HBO's "Bored to Death" Finale, 2009

"It's good to stay in the dark about some things. Keeps life interesting."

Carl Reiner on Mel Brooks, Washington Post, December 6, 2009

"[Mel's] a man of very strong tastes [and can't stand it when I eat onions] because he doesn't like onions and he judges everything on how it affects him."

Tom Petty, Rolling Stone, December 10, 2009

"I had an explosive side. It wasn't that easy to set me off. But when it happened, I lost it in a big way. I've learned to control that. But I had a tough childhood and took a lot of abuse. The rage was in me, and when it got away from me, I didn't know how to control it. But I could vent it in this music."

"I had a wonderful mother. She was a very kind, good person. My father was Jerry Lee Lewis if he didn't play the piano. He was scary and violent. He beat the living hell out of me and and there was constant verbal abuse. Looking back on it, he probably was disappointed that I was so drawn to the arts. Makes life so much worse than it has to be, and believe me it's a nightmare without their help."

Barry Levinson on Robert DeNiro, Washington Post, December 6, 2009

"What makes him great as an actor and fascinating as an individual is that you can never figure the man out completely. He always seems to have a secret. You want to know more and you can't ever know enough."

Paul Taylor of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, NYT, October 18, 2009

"I've always needed a certain amount of solitude...I like people OK. It is just that I like being by myself."

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2009, Season X, Episode X

"I'm not used to giving people the benefit of the doubt. I'm not conditioned to doing it. Something told me, 'no don't do it, it's not for you.'"

Kevin Smith, Huffington Post, October 5, 2009

"It's sad when you realize you can't be the angry young man anymore. The angry young man is barely ever interesting, and tolerable in his 20s. But his late 20s? Early 30s? God forbid late 30s? You can't anymore."

Elliott Gould, Esquire, October 2009

"There is no escape. There is no place to go. Our life is on earth."

"It is essential that I listen so I can try to minimize the problems I create for myself."

"For a kid - or for a repressed, inhibited shy person - to find out that you could have an effect on people by making a joke was interesting. So I would do that."

"It's not women who are tough. It's life."

"I live alone and that simplifies a lot."

"Whenever I die, that will be when I die. What's the big deal. I mean, if I just had some lentil soup, I'd rather not make a mess, but other than that, what's the big deal?"

"The best friend I ever had - I don't know that it's a who. 'What' would make more sense. Calm is a good friend of mine."

"I have persisted but without a ballpark, without a game, without a team. We go on."

Rosanne Cash, NYT, October 4, 2009

"I was always dreamy, thinking about art and not knowing where to buy stamps. I have a terror of running out of stamps."

"I have regrets. I don't understand people who say they don't have any regrets."

Merle Haggard, Rolling Stone, October 1, 2009

Author: In his songs, Haggard often portrays himself as a free-spirited rambler, but in life he's weighed down by a complicated personality - intelligent, ornery, contrary, impulsive, always curious, with a deep worrying streak. "I've never seen anybody who can take a light load and make it a major burden the way Merle can," his manager, Fuzzy Owen, has said. "Merle's a mood man," observes his pianist, Doug Colosio. "He lives in the moment. You never know where things are going - just that it's probably not somewhere you've been before."

"I can get depressed real easy. My life is not as smooth as it might appear. There are secrets that I wish there weren't, and the glue - I'm the glue I guess, that keeps it all from falling apart."

Most of all he misses Johnny Cash. "We was more like brothers than the brothers we had. We understood each other's problems. He was the guy every macho guy in the world wanted to be, and he wasn't happy with himself at all. I'm a lot like that."

"I've shot myself in the foot plenty. I don't even have to look back at my career to see that - I can look down at my foot. But I'm just not one to give a lot of thought to the brilliant ways to make money. I guess you'd call me a lazy thinker in that particular area, but I think more about good songs and catching a big bass than I do about how to make money."

[While in prison] he found a way to escape from every single place he was locked up. Asked what motivated him, he shrugs, "I don't like to be told what to do."

From his wife: "It does him so much good not to think. He asked me, 'why would you want to not think?' I said 'Well you might want to give your mind a rest.'"

David Duchovny, Rolling Stone, September 17, 2009

Author: One of his favorite mottos, he says, is from Nietzsche - amor fati - love of fate. "Whatever happens to you, fall in love with it, because there's really no other option. You can decide to rail against the fates. You can think 'Oh, I'm a victim! or Woe is me!' But it happened. So love it. And see what the good is coming out of it."

Jeff Tweedy, Wilco Lead Singer, Rolling Stone September 3, 2009

"I think it would be a waste of suffering if you don't gain wisdom or insight from it."

Actress Jane Lynch, NYT, September 27, 2009

"I traveled within all the groups [in high school]. Started that pattern of don't stay long enough for anyone to get to know you, to see the chinks in your armor."

Eli Roth, New Yorker, August 31, 2009

“In response to Quentin Tarantino saying that Jews are willing to give a form of absolution. “The Jews are more angry about shit from 7,000 years ago than we were when it happened. We never forget and we do not forgive. Those [referring to Tarantino’s description] ain’t my people.”

Greg Allman, Rolling Stone, July 9 -23 2009

"To tell you the truth, it's my sixth marriage and i'm starting to think it's me."

Cornel West, Rolling Stone, May 28, 2009

"I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas."

Kris Kristofferson, Rolling Stone, April 16, 2009

"I do wish I could take all the good moments of my life and spread 'em out like one every other year. It seems too that 'good times,' like the 'hard time,' come in bunches.

"Before he died, my father told me that 'I'll never understand what you have been doing with your life, but I do understand your NEED to do it."

On Johnny Cash, Uncut, February 2009

From his son: "My dad lived with pain his whole life. It was partially the way he was made, and partially the pain of addiction and partially the loss of his brother. His greatest pain was interior pain. But in the last 10 to 12 years of his life, physical pain took over. And you don't triumph over physical pain. Every day of his life he dealt with some sort of physical pain and for the last 10 years he was an abusive addict for the most part. He never stopped using substances."

Johnny Cash, Uncut, November 2008

"A record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don't wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?"

On Clay Felker, former editor of New York Magazine, in New York, August 2008

"Clay was not a monogamous person. It wasn't that he was such physically lustful male. It was that he really preferred women to men. I mean, without fuss or anything. He loved variety. Really, it was sort of in a not mean way - it was a harem mentality. I don't think he ever felt guilty about it. If he could keep the ball in the air so that he could be seeing three or four women at the same time, he was delighted. As I say, not that he was a great stud. He wasn't. But it was because he just loved seeing different women and having friendships and racing around."

John McEnroe, NYT, August 24, 2008

"I'm not mellow, I'm mellower."

"I was always fighting the establishment, trying to run through brick walls. I don't have the angst I had."

From his wife: "He's an affectionate guy, a happy guy and man can he get freaking angry. He never goes off on meter maids. He just ices them. It's the worst. You don't want that wind blowing your way."

He definitely cares what people think. He definitely gets wounded. He just doesn't ever let what people think dictate what he does."

"I could have controlled [my temper] better. My parents always thought so. On some level I didn't control it because I didn't want to. But I took economics at Stanford, and it's the law of diminishing returns. I did feel out of control, and I didn't like it. Maybe what I like so much about what I do now is that I'm in control."

From brother Patrick: "Part of him enjoys chaos. He likes things to be a little unsettled. Wreaking havoc, what unsettles others, he can handle."

Snoop Dogg, Esquire, July 2008

"Love goes unappreciated a lot of times, but you still gotta keep giving it."

"A lot of people like to fool you and say that you're not smart if you never went to college, but common sense rules over everything. That's what I learned from selling crack."

"Weed makes me feel the way I need to feel"

Keith Richards, GQ, April 2008

"I'm not calling myself wise. I refuse to grow up. But there are certain threads. Whether you connect the threads together, well...And really, there's nothing quite like having your kids or your grandkids or the people you know and love still say you're okay, because quite honestly, I don't know if I am or not. I mean, I'm just gonna do what I've got to do, and I've gotta live with the consequences, which I have quite often."

James Caan, Esquire, January 2008

"I never saw my dad cry. My son saw me cry. My dad never told me he loved me and consequently I told Scott I loved him every other minute. The point is, I'll make less mistakes than my dad, my sons hopefully will make less mistakes than me, and their sons will make less mistakes than their dads. And one of these days, maybe we'll raise a perfect Caan."

Chuck Berry, Esquire, January 2008

"I haven't been to church in 13 years, but I'm better prepared for heaven than most of those that haven't missed a day."

Peter Boyle, Esquire, January 2008

"When I was about to become a father, my friend Burgess Meredith said, 'You're gonna find something wonderful - someone you love more than yourself.' For self-centered people, it's a great blessing."

Mel Brooks, Esquire, January 2008

"You could never give your mother as much as she gave you."

Don Rickles, Esquire, January 2008

"No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a Jew sitting in the beach chair next to you."

Garry Shandling, Esquire, January 2008

"Tom Hanks seems to know exactly what he's doing."

“Everyone at a party is uncomfortable. Knowing that makes me more comfortable."

"Some people can fake it their whole lives."

Carrie Fisher, Esquire, January 2008

"The older you get, the easier it is to spot the phonies. And I just think, how unpleasant for them."

"When you get on a manic run, you feel like you're a house burning down from the inside out. It's like having a bellyful of electric eels. Every ball you hit is out of the park. Every word you're searching for is right at the tip of your tongue. You look through the facts in your head, your library, your catalog of memories and experiences and information, and it's all there, everything. You have every connection before you even look for it. It's the best version of yourself, sold back to yourself on the cheap every minute every minute every minute."

Judd Apatow, NYT, May 27, 2007

"I was always last-picked for teams and it was devastating. I gravitated toward comedians because they were the ones who were pointing out hypocrisy and lying. I needed someone to tell me that it OK because I felt really bad."

Bono, Rolling Stone, November 3, 2007
"The great sadness of [my father's] life was that he didn't learn the piano. Oddly enough, kid's not really encouraged to have big ideas, musically or otherwise. To dream was to be disappointed. Which of course explains my megalomania."

"I don't think I'm like him. I have a very different relationship with my kids than he had with me. He didn't really have one with me. He generally thought that no one was as smart as him in the room....By not encouraging me to be a musician, even though that's all he ever wanted to be, he's made me one. By telling me never to have big dreams or else, that to dream is to be disappointed, he made me have big dreams."

Gerard Butler, NYT magazine, April 17, 2005
“I’m very extreme...There's the good me and the bad me. And back then I drank a lot - it was a constant search for the perfect buzz. Sometimes I miss that search. I still cherish those dark moments, but I don't want to go there again...I had a moment of truth. Well, actually I had 600 moments of truth. I went back and forth but I was sick of being sick and tired of being tired. Now I save my pain and anxiety for work."

Las Vegas Mayor and former mob lawyer Oscar Goodman, Esquire, January 2005
"The old timers I used to represent were pretty special people who really believed in a code of honor. We may not agree with that code of honor but honor is always special, even if its a variety you don't subscribe to."

George Clooney, Esquire, January 2005
"To me, Al Cowlings is the best example of a friend. I embrace Al Cowlings for being the guy O.J. called up and said, ‘Dude, they're framing my ass. Start up the car. Get me $20,000 and a passport. Let's get on the road.’ It's very easy to be a friend when the pressure's not on. I embrace the man who can get in a car and drive his buddy in the blindness of all reality and truth - which his buddy just murdered two people. Total blindness. I admire that. I'd like to have friends like that. I'd like to think I'm that friend. However the bigger truth is that you're on the run with a guy who just murdered two people. Once your eyes are opened, what do you do?"

Ozzy Osbourne, Esquire, January 2005
"You don't accidentally become an asshole. It takes a bit of work."

Washington Post legendary columnist Chalmers Roberts at 94, WPost, August 28, 2004
"I do want to add a final word about the hereafter. I do not believe in it. I think that the religions which promise various after-life scenarios basically invented them to meet the longing for an answer to life's mysteries."

Robert Downey's ex-wife on the actor, NYT, 2004
"I think the wounds with Robert are growing up and repeating the pattern [of his youthful drug life]. I think his specific wounds are yet to be revealed to him. They're yet for him to look at."

Director Elia Kazan on Marlon Brando, Time, July 12, 2004
"He never knew where the hell he was going to sleep. You didn't know who he was running away from or who he was angry with. You never knew."

A British journalist on Tony Blair, NYT, 6/20/04
"He's like an aging relative who refuses to wear a hearing aid. He will lead, he will not bend, and he will do what he thinks right even if he's the only one who thinks it."

On Ben Stiller in NYT, 6/20/04
"Off screen, Mr. Stiller affects an approachable, nice-guy persona, but he can also look sullen and shifty, radiating - and therefore inspiring - paranoia. One suspects he is much like the version of himself he played in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' - strenuously easygoing, yet unable to shake off an insult. A stewer as much as a doer."

Actor/Filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2004
"If you asked David what it was like fighting Goliath, he'd say, 'Man, I was looking for the right size stone.' I was so busy looking for the right stone, I never reflected on what was happening."

Producer Rick Rubin on Johnny Cash, from "Unearthed" liner notes
"I always saw Johnny as being, personally, a work in progress. He was always trying to improve himself in any way he could. If you said something to him or made a suggestion, he would never say anything but he would take it away and think about it and work on it."

Larry David on "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
"I don't like talking to people I know. Strangers I have no problem with."

Arthur Miller, Esquire, July 2003
“Sex is the most compressed set of circumstances that we’ve got. Everything is in that collision.”

“Sex is always trouble. That’s part of why it’s so pleasurable – because for a moment the cloud lifts and then descends again.”

“I find myself interested in what I’m looking at.”

“Some failures are right. And some people fail because society isn’t ready for them. That’s what makes it so difficult.”

From “Clerks”
“I hate people but I love gatherings. Isn’t it ironic?”

From "The Natural"
"We have two lives. The life we learn and the life we live."

On Keanu Reeves, GQ, 5/03
Author: “He has been so successful at cocooning his public image in a kind of enigmatic murk one can only guess at the number and nature of his demons.”

On Director McG, GQ, 5/03
McG does not drink – not so much as a beer…He is morbidly afraid of losing control…He reveals that his childhood fascination with psychology grew from his own anxiety and depression. He says they are afflictions that have plagued him since he was young.

“I’m not the most mentally healthy kid on the block,” he says. Making others feel good has been his most reliable method for feeling better about himself. “McG likes to walk on the sunny side of the street…he’s always been the people pleaser…he doesn’t want to let that dark side of the world get him down,” says his sister.

On financier Jeffrey Epstein, Vanity Fair, March 2003
“Whether in conversations or negotiations, he always stands back and lets the other person determine the style and manner of the conversation or negotiation. And then he responds in their style. Jeffrey sees it in chivalrous terms. He does not pick a fight, but if there is a fight he will let you choose your weapon.”

Keith Olbermann, NYT, July 21, 2002
“[Sports] is my first language. “

By author: “Sports is the first thing we were good or bad at, the first event we watched rapt, the first thing we ever read we didn’t have to. Our first strongly held opinions were about players or teams, and the way in which they differed from those of our friends were among our earliest intimations of a self.”

Oakland GM Billy Beane, NYT, March 30, 2002
“Lenny [Dykstra] was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball. He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. I was the opposite.”

Woody Allen
“Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.”

Tony Shaloub on his character “Monk” & comparison to S. Holmes, NYT, October 13, 2002
“Holmes only needed the drugs when he wasn’t working. When Holmes was engaged in a case, his brain was on fire and he was doing what he was born to do. The same is true for Monk. When he latches onto some important detail in a case, he’s free of all his phobias and neuroses and at least for the moment, he is at peace.”

“As totally dependent as he is, Monk pretty much exists by himself.”

“ Monk” Writer Andy Breckman, NYT, October 13, 2002
“Monk is like Holmes in that he is the most gifted guy around and the most troubled. He’s just not happy out in the world. Everything is just in so much disarray that he can’t deal with it.”

Actor William Petersen on his “CSI” character, NYT, October 13, 2002
“I see him as a man who makes very careful choices about everything, and I think that Grissom is still making up his mind about beings, about whether they actually deserve to be trusted.”

Director Michael Cimino, Vanity Fair, DATE TBD
"When I'm kidding, I'm serious and when I'm serious, I'm kidding. I am not who I am and I am who I am not."

Paul Newman, NYT, July 14, 2002
"All of these characters [in Road to Perdition] are connected by these ropes. The rope between the father and the son, between the man and his boss. The story is all about being pulled in different directions and having to either sever one of the ropes or they grab you. That sounds very phony, but to me, that's what the whole thing was about. You pull them or you release them, if you can."

John Lennon from old interview reprinted in Vanity Fair, November 2001
“Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Both things are both true.”

Keith Richards, Rolling Stone, October 17, 2002
"[Mick] will never lie about in a hammock, just hanging out. Mick has to dictate to life. He wants to control it. To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you...He can't go to sleep without writing out what he's going to do when he wakes up. I just hope to wake up and it's not a disaster. My attitude was probably formed by what I went through as a junkie. You develop a fatalistic attitude toward life. He's a bunch of nervous energy. He has to deal with it in his own way, to tell life what's going to happen rather than life telling you."

Some guy with last name Bass, GQ, June 2002
"I think we've got this whole thing backward, to tell you the truth. I don't think a god created us in his image. I think we created a god in our image."

Larry David, Esquire, March 2002
"I realized I could speak to [my therapist] every day for two hours for the rest of my life and I'll be exactly the same. All you're doing is exacerbating everything by exploring yourself so deeply. It's too much. You can learn too much about yourself. I think there's a limit."

On a prospective visit to a memorial: "You know, normally I love a good pall, but this is beyond pall. Anything where the society as a whole would be depressed would probably have buoyed my spirits a little bit - but not this. This is a bit much. Those are nice sneakers by the way."

Richard Lewis on Larry David: "Larry gets his neuroses not from a Method school - he's the Olivier of neurosis. I don't think in real life he suffers that much internally. I hope not. His obsessiveness is to make good art and be a good father and husband. I *think*. I say that about people and then you read the next day that someone was dressed up like Peter Pan on top of a bicycle."

Writer Brendan Lemon, GQ, October 2001
"The most important thing in communications is to hear what isn't being said."

Larry David, NYT, September 30, 2001
“I feel aggravated I’m missing what other people are getting.”

Uma Thurman, NY, April 22, 2001
"It's funny how children really want normal. You just want to be flawed enough to fit in, good enough to fit in. It's strange because you would think special would be the real goal but it's not. Special is weird."

"For years I tried terribly hard to conform and always failed. It's very good for your mimicking skills. I had the burdensome name to boot, so I always tried to change that. I kind of cheated and turned my middle name into Karen, which was the closest thing I thought I could get away with...I think I'm still working on [getting reconciled with the unusual name]. I think these things are essential markings and they may start out as burdens but they end up as gifts."

Michael Paterniti, author of “Driving Mr. Albert”
“One of the themes of my earlier life, is that I was forever projecting myself forward and backward at the same time, negating the present moment, changing my mind with alarming frequency. A master of vicissitudes, I fell in and out of love with certain ideas and certain rock bands and certain girlfriends who, in the end, must have been glad to see me go. After all, I couldn’t name my longing and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place where I stood.”

“When I really thought about it, after I’d outrun anybody remotely interested in me, I wondered how I might ever find someone with whom I might happily live.”

Albert Einstein, as quoted in the above book: “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.”

Neil Young, NYT magazine, 2000
“ I just didn’t like people telling me what to do…That’s when I came up with the concept of destroying what I created in order to move on.”

“I’ve left some charred paths behind me.”

Exchange between Girlfriend and Sean Penn’s character Emmet Ray in “Sweet & Lowdown”
Girlfriend: “You keep your feelings all locked up and you can’t feel nothing for anybody else.”

Ray: “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Actress Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ, July 2000
“I want the magical power to have a movie soundtrack playing all the time in my life. Wouldn’t it be great if the perfect song could always come on at the perfect moment? I wouldn’t want to bother anyone else with it, so the only people who would be able to hear it would be me and whoever else was in the scene with me.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Lester Bangs character in "Almost Famous"
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."

NYPD Blue creator David Milch, NYT, June 18, 2000
“I lived a shadow life. Somehow I was able to find more constructive accommodations for all these impulses.”

“[The Sipowicz character] is challenged, in terms of his habits, his addictions, his temperament.”

Mayor Anthony Williams, Washington Post Magazine, June 4, 2000
“I took the scenic route through life, and didn’t get on the interstate until pretty late. Then I had to floor it.”

“My approach, psychologically, from the time I was little, is to just let it ride, let it ride, and then – at the right moment – move in. You are gonna get a lot more coming in below the radar, and moving up, than if you just came in and got shot down from the beginning.”

David Letterman, Esquire, May 2000
”Life is like swimming the English Channel. Just because you’re greased up and on the shore doesn’t mean you won’t be taken out by a barracuda.”

John Cusack on his character in “High Fidelity,” NYT, April 2, 2000
“[The character] is a guy who ought to know better than to be the way he is. And in fact, he does know better. He’s a lazy, delusional slacker but he’s brutally honest with himself and has these terrifically incisive insights and that’s what makes him redeemable.”

Garry Shandling in NYT, March 15, 2000
“Relationships may be the final frontier for me. I’m very comfortable with myself and with being alone so I’m not driven to be in a relationship. I’m far more content now than I’ve ever been in my life. But you know, if there’s something I’m missing, I’m the first to want to know.”

“I wouldn’t want to be me.”

“I was one of those kids who didn’t quite fit in in high school…You don’t end up like me if you fit in.”

Nick Nolte in People, February 7, 2000
“I identify with the misfit…You get to a point in your life when you realize you’re a combination of all the mistakes you made.”

Movie Critic and Philosopher Robert McKee in “20 Dates”
“Men obsess about the physical. Women do the opposite. Women obsess on the metaphysical. Women create a phantom image of a man - their ideal man - and they’re in love throughout their lives with a man who does not exist. Therefore, they’re comparing every man they meet to their phantom image and no man can possibly measure up to that. And since men are obsessing on the physical and women are obsessing on the metaphysical, the possibilities of two people who are less than ideal - and that’s everyone - having a transcendent, unconditional relationship for the rest of their lives are not good.”

Former University of Chicago President, NYT December 19, 1999
“Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lay down until it goes away.”

TV Writer David Hackel on Ted Danson’s “Becker” character, NYT, December 12, 1999
“He has clear attitudes about things. You may not agree with them, I may not agree with them, but when he speaks, everybody listens. I think he is an unhappy person, but not all the time. I think he is a very frustrated person, and sometimes depressed. I think he is also one of those guys who sometimes thinks the rules are for everyone else besides him. He is not a consistent character, and he is often dead wrong.”

Vaughn Meader in NYT magazine, November 21, 1999
“The conclusion I’ve come to is the cosmic force of timing…It’s like a Swiss watch and we’re all working for it whether we know it or not. There’s a celestial clock with gears within gears and wheels within wheels and individuals spiraling through life…when it’s time, it’s time. It’s almost like the movie of our lives is already in the can and all it’s doing now is running, with the earth as our stage. So everybody’s got parts, and when each of us comes to our grand finale, then that’s that.”

Phil Jackson in SI, November 1, 1999
“Institutional religion doesn’t attract me but the philosophical nature of Christianity appeals to me. Love. Love thy neighbor. What also appeals to me is the emphasis Buddhism places on compassion. Love and compassion. I like that combination.”

Woody Harrelson in NYT, October 31, 1999
“I don’t lay down the law about anything. I guess that makes me full of contradictions. I want to be liquid. I don’t want to be solid mass.”

“Things used to ignite me, definitely. I don’t let things get me that much these days. Anger comes from pain, so it behooved me to take a look at that pain. Otherwise it’s going to destroy me, it’s going to kill me. So I did it. I took a look at it and I went pretty deep.”

“[I] confronted things that would have toppled people mentally, would have crushed me at least for a while and I just took it. It’s not like I became Zen or anything. I’m a long way from that. What helps the most is that I feel I love myself. Check that, I like myself a lot. Just right there on the periphery of loving myself.”

Ultimately, what do we want? We want to be at peace. And I’m not saying I’m at peace, but I sure have a lot of moments of peacefulness.”

On a character he plays: “He’s a wanderer and he cannot settle down. He’s always running away…He dreams bigger than his capabilities but he’s well intentioned.”

As described: “He’s much smarter than he looks…He’s just a mischievous, adventurous human being. He definitely marches to the beat of his own distinct drum, but what I appreciate about the way he steps is that it’s never to the detriment of others. It’s about just being who he is.”

Ben Affleck, GQ, October 1999
“The reason I’m single is because I wouldn’t want to be with anybody right now who would be willing to be with me.”

Phil Spector, Esquire, September 1999
“I am constantly trapped in my own freedom, environment and heredity.”

“Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage. The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.”

“Since I’m one of those people who are not happy unless they are not happy, it’s comforting to know that mental health doesn’t always mean being happy.”

Sting, on fidelity, Esquire, September 1999
“It’s a revelation that’s coming to me. I’m still a dog. I still desire women. I love every woman. As most men do. But I’m coming to realize more and more that one woman is all women. If I put enough energy and care into that one relationship I have, then all of the myriad possibilities that the romantic sexual world offer will be included in that one. I believe that now. Because I think in all of that multiplicity, you get diminishing returns.”

Carolyn Cassady (widow of Neal) on Jack Kerouac in “King of the Beats”
“[All that Jack ever wanted was] ‘home and kids and the picket fence and the station wagon. He wanted that desperately, and he began to realize as time went on that he could never handle the responsibility of that. His whole life was about escape….He was such a dreamer. It was escape all the time.”

Bill Murray, in NYT Magazine, 1999
By Murray: “There’s something about work, just like there’s something about romance, that if you don’t have to have someone, you’re more desirable.”

“A lot of [the movie] ‘Rushmore’ is about the struggle to retain civility and kindness in the face of extraordinary pain…In ‘Rushmore’ I play a guy who’s aware that his life is not working, but he’s still holding on, hoping something will happen and that’s what’s most interesting. In life, you never have to completely quit. There’s some futile paddling toward some shore of relief, and that’s what gets people through. Only the really lucky get a tailwind that takes them to the shore. So many get the headwind that they fight and the tip over and drown.”

“When you become an adult and get to pick your pleasures, they should be worth picking.”
By the author: “Murray is in a constant state of discernment. He’s alert to nuance.”

Evel Knievel, Esquire, July 1999
“If a guy hasn’t got any gamble in him, he isn’t worth a crap.”

Eric Clapton in Vanity Fair, June 1999
“[Blues are] a man’s music…very deep and mature, a way for me to identify with the idea of becoming a man.”

David Chase, Creator of “The Sopranos,” NYT, 6/6/99
“I’ve always been anxious, fearful, competitive, envious and angry.”

Ted Williams, Esquire,1999
“The most fun I ever had in my life was hittin' a baseball. And the best sound I ever heard in my life was a ball with a bat. Powww!"

"I take two things into consideration if you're a guest: the city you're from and your exposure to baseball."

"In order to be called great ya gotta have the circumstances surrounding ya."

Sean Penn in NYT Magazine, 1999
by the author: “He is a throwback to the sort of men - tough, thoughtful, somewhat dangerous, full of inchoate feeling - who haunt the songs of Bruce Springsteen and the writings of Charles Bukowski. Penn is romantic about America and the kind of questing spirit that finds solace driving fast on an open highway or crashing a small town motel room or drinking late in an all-night bar.”

Will McDonough on Johnny Unitas on ESPN’s Century’s Greatest Athletes - 1999
“Even when he won he was unhappy…that’s how competitive he was.”

Artie Shaw in Vanity Fair, June 1999
“You don’t make it happen…you let it happen.”

George Lucas in NYT, March 21, 1999
“I’m a cynical optimist.”

Photographer/Diarist Peter Beard, in ICON Magazine
“I’ve never really made a plan. I’ve never followed a plan. I’ve never known what I was doing….My whole life has just been spontaneous escape from one thing or another.”

From HBO’s “The Sopranos”
Carmela to Tony: “Everything with you is a multiple choice question. I can’t tell whether you’re old fashioned, paranoid or just an asshole.”

Federico Fellini in GQ, January 1999
“Commitment, I feel, prevents a man from developing. I am committed to non-commitment.”

Jon Stewart in Icon, December 1998
“I’m sure I have a lot of unresolved issues, but I talk a very healthy game.” If I shone a light on your life, there’s tragedy there. Everybody’s got their own little Shakespearean play going. Then there’s people that are truly insane and can’t do anything about it. But the rest of us have to try to suck it up.”

Cheech Marin to Kevin Costner in “Tin Cup”
“You can’t ask advice about the woman you’re trying to hose from the woman you’re trying to hose.”

Artie Shaw, in Icon, December 1998
“Love is an agreement between two people to overestimate each other.”

Horse Racing Writer and Handicapper Andrew Beyer in NYT, November 8, 1998
--on his passion/profession: “Everyone goes through life in whatever they do dreaming of finding some flash of insight that altered their lives and this was mine.”

“People never know when they’re living through a golden moment.”

Writer/Director Paul Schrader in NYT, January 3, 1999
“I’ve been doing love stories all along. It’s just that nobody ever returns these guys’ love. They’re crushed, bruised romantics. I’m going to do one now where somebody actually loves him in return.”

Angelina Jolie, in GQ, January 1999
”I don’t really cook, and I don’t like to be touched all the time, and I don’t really like to explain myself. If somebody’s living with me, I usually leave the house a lot.”

Cathy Ponton King in “Sweet, Sad & Lonely,” 1999
“My love and my pain are one and the same.”

Woody Allen in Vanity Fair, December 1998
“The heart wants what it wants.”

NYT profile of Kris Kristofferson DATE TBD
“He is what he wrote about, a walking contradiction…propelled through life less by reason than by impulse; a Golden Gloves boxer blessed with a poet’s understanding of irredeemable loss and late-night yearnings. Rugged yet capable of being wounded, solitary yet reachable, he veers between two styles: supremely laid-back and wound tighter than most.”

Vittorio DeSica, director of “The Bicycle Thief,” NYT, 11/27/98
“There are no small events when it comes to the poor.”

Bruce Springsteen, on “Charlie Rose Show,” 11/20/98
“… And my mother was very consistent and was somebody who – we had a relationship that was…It was easier to understand, you know? It was nurturing, and there was faith involved and support and a lot of giving love.”

“You learn by your bad experiences. And that’s just the way it goes, you know? We internalize everything and carry it with us.

“… It’s all a lesson…I think with my children, I try to be patient and not run and be there, but I think also to respect their wishes, in some sense, the serious wishes, the serious desires, if they have an interest, to indulge it, that’s how you know or don’t know. You don’t know what that moment might bring 10, 15 years down the road.

“And why do we think of things 30 years later, some small incident that we’ll be thinking of when we’re dying, on our deathbed, some small incident that had no apparent meaning on the day that it occurred. Those are the things that’s the essence of what it’s all about. I think when you address your children, you have to always be on the lookout for that – that moment. It should be just sort of a daily way of interacting. So I’ve tried to do that better.

“… There’s a certain amount of psychology that comes with what kind of person are you. Are you a watcher? Are you somebody who – do you jump in and are you active right away, or do you – or do you watch? Do you stand back and observe? That was always my nature. My nature was I was standing back, and I watched the way things interrelated and the way – what was going on around me. I might have been too frightened to join in. I didn’t know how to join in.

“So, it was a part of – observation was a part of my psychology. And I think that has a lot to do with people who then go on and write or take their own thoughts and formulate them in some fashion. It’s usually a result of a variety of dysfunctions that you’ve managed to channel into something positive and creative, rather than destructive.

“[my music came out of ] my experience growing up and my relationship with my father and understanding and trying to understand the concept of work and how work plays a central role in your life. I had two very different examples. My mother’s relation to work was very joyous, was very happy…And what she gained from it was an entire mode of behavior. You get up in the morning at a certain time. You prepare yourself. You get yourself ready to go to a job. And you walk down the street and you’re there at a particular time in the day, and you interact with your coworkers and that’s a big part of your social life and your work life and your place in the world. You’re doing something with a purpose. There’s a reason you’re there besides just feeding your family. You’re a part of the social fabric. You’re what’s holding the world together. You’re what’s holding your town together. That’s what’s holding your family together. And I always remembered she walked with tremendous pride and strength - enormous strength. And it gave such great comfort, such great, great comfort to a child.

“And I think my dad had different experiences. Work was involved with pain…That’s essential. That’s central to the way that we live and think about ourselves and who we are and the place we live and so I saw both sides of it. I saw what happens when that’s not present. There is pain, and there is anger. It’s a very destructive force. You wither away. You waste away. You don’t know where you’re going or who you are and you take that out on the people that you care about, which is something you don’t want to do.”

Johnny Depp, in Icon, June 1998
“I like the idea of marriage. I don’t know if I believe in it, but I like the idea, the concept. I don’t know if one person can be with one person until they die. I don’t know if that’s humanly possible.”

From the movie “Strictly Ballroom”
“A life lived in fear is a life half lived”

Muddy Waters on Paul Oscher, Undated
"He plays the soul I feel."

Shirley MacLaine on Frank Sinatra, New Yorker, November 3, 1997
“If you helped him more than he helped you, the friendship was doomed because the balance he wanted had been tipped. He was a happy man when he was able to come to my rescue. ‘Oh, I just wish someone would try to hurt you so I could kill them for you,’ he’d say.”

Pete Hamill on Frank Sinatra, Ibid
“He understood loneliness better than any person of his generation. I mean a certain kind of urban loneliness.” {Author writes]: “But what Sinatra evokes is not strictly urban. It is a very particular American loneliness – that of the self adrift in its pursuit of the destiny of ‘me,’ and thrown back onto the solitude of its own restless heart.”

Orson Welles, as quoted in 1997 SI article on David Wells
“Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.”

Unknown
“There are only three things in life. There’s what other people think you are. There’s what you think you are. And there’s what you really are.”

Writer J. Anthony Lukas NYT, October 12, 1997
“All writers, I think, are to one extent or another damaged. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.”

On Director Oliver Stone, Washington Post, November 1997
“His mind is always at work but his heart is also at work. One does not suppress the other. He could be having the most enlightened conversation one minute and the next minute his head is whipping around so he can comment on someone’s breasts.”

“He shines his light in the dirty corners of the American psyche.”

Randall “Tex” Cobb, in GQ, November 1997
“The measure of a man is what happens when nothing works and you got the guts to go on.”

George Clooney, in Washington Post, October 1997
“The way you want to do it is like Cary Grant. Have a successful career, then in 1966…decide you’re looking too old, leave the movies and never look back. Then at 80 years old have a stroke and drop dead. That’s perfect.”

“I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. I don’t know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life -- the only thing I know to exist – to be wasted.”

Bob Dylan, Newsweek, October 6, 1997
“Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else…I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists and all that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

“I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”

Bob Dylan, in NYT, September 28, 1997
“I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen. I’m inconsistent, even to myself.”

“Environment affects me a great deal. A lot of the songs were written after the sun goes down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes.”

Joni Mitchell, in Vanity Fair, June 1997
“I’m a serial monogamist…Kind of horrifying to the last generation, where everybody stuck together. This generation, we’re so worn down that nobody can stay in our company for any length of time.”

Columnist George Vecsey on Patrick Ewing – NYT, May 18, 1997
“Ewing exists in a civil world halfway between leader and loner.”

Bob Dylan, on his divorce -- Washington Post, February 10, 1997
“People fall in love with a person’s body…with the way they dress, with their scorecards. With everything but their real selves, which is what you need to love if you’re to be happy together.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Zelda – NYT Magazine, December 1, 1996
“Her passionate love of life and her absolute inability to meet it seems so tragic that sometimes it is scarcely to be endured.”

Photographer Peter Beard in Vanity Fair, November 1996
“The institution of marriage should be re-examined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia. The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It’s an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically it’s very unnatural. It’s masochism and torture the way it’s been organized.”

Jonathan Rosen Essay in New York Times Magazine—1996
“The morning of my wedding, my father gave me a piece of unexpected advice. ‘When you step on the glass, why don’t you imagine that all the doubts and fears of childhood are inside and that you’re smashing them too?”

Anthony Hopkins, Vanity Fair, October 1996
“I’m just very, very selfish. If somebody doesn’t like what I am, I don’t hang around trying to win anybody’s approval. I may have screwed up a lot of my life; I may have hurt a few people…I’m a roamer. I think I’m a bit of a nihilist.”

“I’ve been troubled for years. I don’t quite know with what. Something troubles me, and I don’t know what it is, but it brings me a lot of restlessness…I’m lousy at relationships. I’m too selfish, too self-motivated. I’m a runner.”

Film Director Hal Hartley -- NYT Magazine, 8/4/96
"Love stories aren't about boys and girls, they are about pain and struggle and fear."

David Geffen, Rolling Stone, April 29, 1993,
"No matter how badly I did in school, no matter how little faith I had in myself, my mother always said, 'You have golden hands. Whatever you want to be, you'll succeed at.' And I thought she was a nut, because I was a complete fuck-up and I didn't think I could do anything. But my mother's belief in me gave me a level of confidence that enabled me to succeed."

Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone, August 6, 1992
"[The toughest thing about being a father} is engagement, engagement, engagement. You're afraid to love something so much, you're afraid to be that in love. Because a world of fear leaps upon you, particularly in the world that we live in. But then you realize: 'Oh I see, to love something so much, as much as I love Patti and my kids, you've got to be able to accept and with that world of fear, that world of doubt, of the future. And you've got to give it all today and not hold back.' And that was my specialty - my specialty was keeping my distance so that if I lost something, it wouldn't hurt that much. And you can do that, but you're never going to have anything."

Robin Williams, Rolling Stone, February 25, 1988,
"Oh I don't have inner peace. I don't think I'll ever be the type that goes 'I am now at one with myself.' Then you're fucking DEAD, okay? You're out of your body. I do feel much calmer. And therapy helps a little, I mean it helps a lot. It makes you re-examine everything: your life, how you relate to people, how far you can push the "like me" desire before there's nothing left to like. It makes you face your limitations, what I can and can't do."

Eric Clapton, Rolling Stone, June 20, 1985
"[I'm] obsessive. Part of my character is made up of an obsession to push something to the limit. It can be of great use if my obsession is channeled into constructive thought or creativity, but it can also be mentally or physically or spiritually destructive. I think what happens to an artist is when he feels the mood swings that we all suffer from if we're creative, instead of facing the reality that this is an opportunity to create, he will turn to something that will stop that mood, stop that irritant. And that would be drink or heroin or whatever. He won't want to face that creative urge, because he knows the self-exploration that must be undertaken, the pain that must be faced. This happens most, or very painfully, to artists. Unless they realize what it is that is doing to them, they'll always be dabbling in something or other to kill it."

Bill Murray, Rolling Stone, August 16, 1984
"This is the same conversation I had with my teachers then. 'What's wrong with Bill? Something bothering you? Something wrong at home?' I don't know, I just didn't care for school much. Studying was boring, I was lazy. I'm still lazy. And I had no interest in getting good grades. I was basically causing trouble all the time. But not very serious trouble."

Jack Nicholson, Rolling Stone, March 29, 1984
"By nature, I am not monogamous. But I have been monogamous, which is the only reason I'm comfortable saying this out loud. It doesn't make any difference, except in a positive way, primarily for appearances. I only believe this because of experience. Once I've had enough experience about something, I don't give a fuck about anybody else's theory. I say monogamy doesn't make any difference; women suspect you whether it's true or not."

"I genuinely do [like women]. I prefer the company of women and I have a deep respect for them. I'm buzzed by the female mystique. I always tell young men there are three rules: They hate us, we hate them; they're stronger, they're smarter; and most important, they don't play fair."

"I'd like to say, 'No, it doesn't matter whether somebody's beautiful or not,' but whatever I find beautiful is what I'm attracted to. As for the other other, I'd like to have all the women I'm attracted to STILL be with me. I don't want them unattainable. I don't even want them unavailable!"

"...It's like every male: You're not sure that you're not driving [women] away because you don't know how to leave them."

"...That's the dichotomy. I yearn for honesty in life. As an artist, I yearn for the clear moment. I would tell anybody, any living thing about me, and there's a lot of stuff that ain't great."

"I'll put my medical charts, my sanity charts up against anybody's. I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not doing anything but trying to do everything right. I know what's true, who I am. I would like to say I don't care what people think, but I do. Everyone who knows me may think I'm a tad boyish and fun-loving, but I don't think anybody thinks I have any negative momentum, corrupting philosophies or overly radical moral opinions."

Fictional POTUS quotes Chauncey Gardiner in the last words at funeral in “Being There”
“Life is a state of mind.”

Harvey Keitel as “The Cleaner,” Mr. Wolf, in Pulp Fiction, to Travolta and Jackson
“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.”

Franz Lidz’ mother in film of his book “Unstrung Heroes”
“A hero is anybody who finds his own way through this life.”

George Costanza to Jerry on Seinfeld
“If you take everything I’ve accomplished in my life and condensed it down into one day – it looks decent!

Costanza in another episode on being told he is Marisa Tomei’s type
“What are the odds of me being someone’s type. I would kill to be someone’s type.”

Sonny Corinthos to Brenda Barrett on General Hospital
“We had something that was bigger than life; bigger than anything we’d ever experienced. It scared the hell out of us, so we sabotaged it. We used anger to distance ourselves from each other…from all the bigness. But it never sticks. We always end up right here. Inches apart.”

Jack Nicholson to Shirley McLaine after her declaration of love in “Terms of Endearment”
“I was just inches away from a clean getaway. I don’t know what else to say except my stock answer. I love you too, kid.”

Burt Lancaster’s Character in “Field of Dreams”
“It was like coming this close to your dreams and watching them pass you by like a stranger in the crowd. At the time, you think there’ll be other days. We just don’t know the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. At the time, you think there’ll be other days. I didn’t realize that was the only day.”

The Angel to George in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”

"Every man on that transport died! Harry wasn't there to save them because you weren't there to save Harry. Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

Broadcaster Harry Caray on ESPN’s “Up Close” (1984 or 1987)
“Baseball is life itself.”

General Hospital Mobster/Gangster Sonny Corinthos in 1997 episode
“Once you have everything, you have everything to lose.”

Bob Dylan in “It Ain’t Me Babe”
“When you got nothin, you got nothin to lose.”

Andrew Stott, Professor and author of “Comedy”
“Being funny is a means of avoiding scrutiny. It’s a deeply concealing activity that invites attention while simultaneously failing to offer any detailed account of oneself. The reason humor is so popular today is that it provides the comfort of intimacy without the horror of actually being intimate.”

Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone, November 25, 2010
“I’m an alienated person by nature, always have been, still am to this day. It continues to be an issue in my life, in that I’m always coming from the outside. I’m always operating in distance, and I’m always trying to overcome my own internal reticence and alienation.”

Eminem, Rolling Stone, November 25, 2010

“Sometimes I think we do most of our best thinking on the shitter. What else do you have to do in there besides think?”

Keith Richards, NYT Review of “Life,” November 14, 2010

Author: “Disloyalty is about as low as you can go in his book, one step lower, even, than screwing up the music. Women? Take ‘em. Vices? First round’s on me! But never, ever, EVER cross a mate.”

“Secretariat” Director Randall Wallace, NYT, 11/7/10

“Horses, I think, are similar to women. They want to be admired and appreciated more than they want to be understood. They are magnificent, mysterious animals. And they’re also dangerous; you have to take great care.”

Conan O'Brien, Rolling Stone, November 11, 2010

"I look at other people - Letterman's a perfect example - and I think, 'Oh, he's a precision instrument. And I mean that as a compliment. But myself, I'm not a precision instrument. I go out there and I try stuff and I move and I do things and when I hit a rich vein I jump into it and really go for it. And I let people in on my vulnerability. People know when something isn't going well, or if there's an awkward moment, and when I get excited and happy I move around a lot. There's that famous Marshall McLuhan quote where he said, 'Television's a cool medium.' And I always thought, 'If television's a cool medium, I'm fucked.'"

"But as badly as things went in the beginning - and this sounds weird - but I always wanted to be there more than anybody didn't want to be there...I'm very aware when I'm not right for something. So let's say I had somehow been made the quarterback for the New England Patriots, replacing Tom Brady. I would ask to be taken out of the game after my first hit. But no matter how hard I got hit on late-night television, I never wanted to be taken out."

Author: "O'Brien's humor is so relentlessly self-deprecating it's easy to overlook the fact that he also has a serious ego....Unlike, say, Letterman, whose comedy seems to come from a place of deep self-loathing, O'Brien acknowledges that underneath 'layers of questioning, doubting, double-checking, worrying,' he possesses a 'solid adamantium core of confidence.' He knows he's generally the funniest guy in the room."

Robert Smigel: "On Saturday Night Live, Conan and I got along right away because we had this work ethic in common, and we both have a melancholy side. We would go out to dinner a lot, but we wouldn't enjoy ourselves."

Chevy Chase, Esquire, October, 2010

“Love is huge. But if you’re talking men and women, it’s got to start with the most initial obvious attraction that warthogs go through. Look at the ass! That’s what keeps the world spinning. There’s your God!”

Sascha Grey on Scott Caan’s Character’s Fixation on Entourage, 2010
“I can bring up the Spanish Inquisition and Scott will turn it into sexual innuendo.”

Jon Favreau - Esquire, July 2010

"My grandfather always said he didn't care when he got ripped off for money. He said he was most offended when somebody took his time. I didn't understand that at first. But I do now."

"You tend to gravitate to the things you grew up with. So I like Carvel even though it might not be a gourmet ice cream. I just had it with someone...He said 'this is what you were craving?' Yeah because you grew up with it and you live it."

Jerry Seinfeld, NYT, February 28, 2010

"All marriages are based on a sitcom premise: What if you and I tried to stay together for the rest of our lives?"

J Mays, Chief Designer at Ford, Esquire, January 2010

"They're not writing songs about cars anymore."

John Cleese, NYT, 10-04-09

"As you get older you laugh less because you've heard the jokes before."

Don Rickles, Esquire, January 2008

"I used to play golf. I wanted to be a better player, but after a while I realized I'd always stink. And that's when I really started to enjoy the game."

Sarah Silverman, Esquire, January 2008

"Jesus' words have become so perverted over time - it's been like a game of telephone. If he existed, he would fuckin' kill himself."

Dustin Hoffman, Esquire, November 2007

"I became addicted to a derivative of morphine called Demerol. I’d been burned and was in the hospital for a month. When I was healing, everything was fine, and this yoke was lifted off me and there was this Zen feeling that people shoot for when they go into meditation. There was this sense of peace. I remember thinking: Why weren't we constructed this way?"

"I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life."

Donald Trump on what it feels like to be Trump, Esquire, August 2004
"I nod, and it's done"
Ron Reagan Jr., NYT, June 27, 2004
"One thing that Buddhism teaches you is that every moment is an opportunity to change."

Writer/Director Ron Shelton, on his baseball movies
“You can see the plays on TV. I want to show you what goes on between the games.”

“Drama is about people on the fringes, not the stars.”

NYT 6/25 Wedding Story
“Marriage is really an agreement between two people to wing it together.”

Janis Joplin, Reprinted Interview, in WPost, 5/5/98
“I can’t talk about my singing. I’m inside it. How can you describe something you’re inside of?”

Robert Downey Jr. on losing weight due to drug abuse, Playboy, December 1997
“… there’s a part of me that…romanticizes what was going on. Not only was I at zero body fat, I was starting to get down to zero muscle mass. Then it would have been zero bone mass, and then what would have happened? A strong wind and – pixie dust.”

Coffee Shop Owner, in “Pulp Fiction,” to Tim Roth
“I am not a hero. I’m just a coffee shop owner.”