Groucho
"Whatever it is, I"m against it."
Bono, Rolling Stone, November 3, 2005
"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."
Actor 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 witht 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 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 religiouns 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 specifc wounds are yet to be revealed to him. They're yet for him to look at."
Donald Trump on what it feels like to be Trump, Esquire, August 2004
"I nod, and it's done"
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."
Ron Reagan Jr. (hey he's a dem!), NYT, June 27, 2004
"One thing that Buddhism teaches you is that every moment is an opportunity to change."
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 fighgting 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."
Keanu Reeves, GQ, 5/03
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, 7/21/02
“ [Sports] is my first language. “
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.” [author].
Oakland GM Billy Beane, NYT, 3/30/02
“ 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, 10/13/02
“ 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, 10/13/02
“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, 10/13/02
“ 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.”
Billy Joel, NYT, 9/15/02
“ The happiest times in my life were when my relationships were going well – when I was in love with someone and someone was loving me. But in my whole life, I haven’t met the person I can sustain a relationship with yet. So I’m discontented about that. I’m angry with myself. I have regrets.”
“ The more I think about the more I think it was all four of those relationships [that drove me to drink too much]. I never really stop thinking about any of them.”]
“ I’ve only felt content a few times in my life and it never lasted. There are situations in my life that didn’t pan out. I’m like most human beings – I try and I fail.”
Director Michael Cimino, Vanity Fair
"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 eithr sever one of the ropes or tey grab you. That sounds very phony, but oto 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 dresed 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.”
NYT 6/25 Wedding Story
“ Marriage is really an agreement between two people to wing it together.”
Exchange bet. 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.”
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, 6/18/00
“ 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, 6/4/00
“ 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, 4/2/00
“ [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, 3/15/00
“ 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, 2/7/00
“ 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.”
Director John Frankenheimer, Washington Post, 2/20/00
“ This journey, this life…[is like] a guy who just lost his girlfriend says, ‘God I’m so sorry it didn’t work out.’ The other guy says, ‘It worked out, just not the way you wanted.’”
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 12/19/99
“ 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, 12/12/99
“ 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, 11/21/99
“ 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, 11/1/99
“ 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, 10/31/99
“ 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.”
Janis Joplin, reprinted in the New Yorker, 1999
“ There isn’t going to be any turning point…There isn’t going to be any next-month-it’ll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don’t have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say ‘So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing.’”
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 fins 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,3/21/99
“ 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, 11/8/98
--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, 1/3/99
“ 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
“ 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 Theif,” 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.
“ 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.
“… 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? Ate 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.”
William Faulkner, quoted in GQ, 9/98
“ Tomorrow night is nothing but one long, sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.”
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”
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.”
Janis Joplin, 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?”
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, 10/12/97
“ All writers, I think, are to one extent or another damaged. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.”
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.”
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, 11/97
“ The measure of a man is what happens when nothing works and you got the guts to go on.”
George Clooney, in WPost, 10/97
“ 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, 10/6/97
“ 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, 9/28/97
“ 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.”
Robert Kennedy, Jr, NYT, 6/15/97
“ I went through a long period where I was knowingly living against conscience.”
Columnist George Vecsey on Patrick Ewing – NYT, 5/18/97
“ Ewing exists in a civil world halfway between leader and loner.”
Bob Dylan, on his divorce -- Washington Post, 2/10/97
“ 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, 12/1/96
“ 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 hat. 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 b e able to accept and with 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 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 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.”
Coffee Shop Owner, in “Pulp Fiction,” to Tim Roth
“ I am not a hero. I’m just a coffee shop owner.”
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 GH
“ 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.”
GH Mobster/Gangster Sonny Corinthos in 1997 episode
“ Once you have everything, you have everything to lose.”
Rev. Jim Ignatowski of “Taxi” (199X)
“ If I could be anybody else in the world, I’d be me. That way I don’t have to buy new clothes.”
Broadcaster Harry Caray on ESPN “Up Close” (1984 or 1987)
“ Baseball is life itself.”
Bob Dylan in “It Ain’t Me Babe” (196X)
“ When you got nothin, you got nothin to lose.”
From Walk Away by Tom Waits
Hell the things I’ve done I can’t erase
I want to look in the mirror and see another face
I said never going to do it again
I want to walk away and start all over again.
No more rain
No more roses
On my way,
Shake my thirst
in a cool, cool park.
There’s a will I’ll never replace
There’s a heart that beating in every page
When the beginning always starts at the end
Well then it’s time to walk away and start all over again.
… A yellow dog knows when he’s sinned
You want to walk away and start all over again.
From “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” by Steve Winwood
If you see something that looks like a star
And it’s shooting up right off the ground
And your head is spinning from a loud guitar.
If you had just a minute to breathe
And they granted you one final wish
Would you ask for something
Like another chance.
Or something similar as this,
Don’t worry too much, it’ll happen to you
As sure as your sorrows are joys.
If I gave you everything that I owned
and asked for nothing in return
Would you do the same for me
as I would for you.
Or take me for a ride
Strip me of everything, including my pride
but spirit is something that no one destroys.
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