"In the cinema, one extracts the thought from the image," Andre Levinson observed over forty years ago, "in literature, the image ...from the thought." Inasmuch as the image comes first on the screen, the film is a more economical medium than the page. Whereas a film-maker can encompass an entire business office in a single frame, a novelist is limited to the piecemeal notation of each person and object in that office. "On paper all you can do is say something happened, and if you say it well enough the reader believes you," John Huston remarked once. "In pictures, if you do it right, the thing happens, right there on the screen."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
John Forbes: You were voted the prettiest girl in the class; I was voted the boy most likely to succeed. Something should happen t...o people like that. Sue Forbes: Well, something did. They got married. John Forbes: Whatever happened to those two people who were going to build a boat and sail around the world? Sue Forbes: Well, I had a baby. I never did hear what happened to you. Oh, come on, wanderlust, you've got a family to support. John Forbes: No South America? Sue Forbes: Not today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, for some reason, you want to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cock...tail lounge in the afternoon.... You sit around the gloom and have a few quiet, meditative drinks, get everything figured out. Then you go out and the sun hits you. And you feel like something that's been drinking in a gopher hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sue Forbes: Old man routine getting you down? John Forbes: Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I get to feel like a wheel within a wh...eel within a wheel. Sue Forbes: You and fifty million others. John Forbes: I don't want to be like fifty million others. Sue Forbes: Oh, but you're John Forbes, average American, backbone of the country. John Forbes: I don't want to be an average American, backbone of the country. I want somebody else to be the backbone and hold me up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer t...o the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: "What is he thinking?" and he knows nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In France it is rude to let a conversation drop; in England it is rash to keep it up. No one there will blame you for silence. Whe...n you have not opened your mouth for three years, they will think: "This Frenchman is a nice quiet fellow." Be modest. An Englishman will say, "I have a little house in the country"; when he invites you to stay with him you will discover that the little house is a place with three hundred bedrooms. If you are a world tennis-champion, say, "Yes, I don't play too badly." If you have crossed the Atlantic alone in a small boat, say, "I do a little sailing."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reality has become so absorbing that the streets, the television, and the journals have confiscated the public interest and people... are no longer thirsty for culture on a higher level.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm going to give the people what they want. Sensation, horror, shock. Send them out in the streets to tell their friends how wond...erful it is to be scared to death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »