The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Bernstein: The Mob put up the money for the club but the Mob doesn't consider homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle. Todd...y: Kill him, but mustn't kiss him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musi...cian. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny's life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn't let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bernstein: "Girls delightful in Cuba stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery but don't feel right spending your money stop.... There is no war in Cuba. Signed Wheeler." Any answer? Charles Foster Kane: Yes--Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thompson: Nothing particular the matter with him, they tell me, just ... Bernstein: Just old age. It's the only disease, Mr. ...Thompson, that you don't look forward to being cured of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another..., always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »