The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters--not to talk in ar...mies and nations and numbers--but to track it home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of Ernest Hemingway, for example, I feel much as I do of Marilyn Monroe, that he was unable to marshal any adequate defense agains...t the painful events of his childhood, and this despite his famous toughness and the courage he could call upon in war, in hunting, in all the dangerous enterprises that seduced him. He was an innocent man, not a naive man, though not always intelligent. Marilyn Monroe offers us a similar paradox. Even when she symbolized an extreme of experience, of sexual knowingness, she took each new circumstance of life, as it came to her or as she sought it, like a newborn babe. And yet this was what made her luminous--her innocence. The glow was not rubbed off her by her experience of the ugliness of life because finally, in some vital depth, she had been untouched by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Summer is different. We now have breakfast together, for example ... it hasn't happened in so long that we're not sure how to go a...bout it. So we bump into each other in the kitchen. I never saw Ozzie and Harriet bump into each other in the kitchen--not once. Ozzie knew his place was at the table, while Harriet knew that her place was at the stove.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many Americans imagine simpler times even as a storm of social change swirls about, blowing parents here and children there. Sure,... the 1950s ideal world would be wonderful. But knock on the nation's doors: Ozzie and Harriet are seldom at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired, ...can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,... If the street were time and he at the end of the street, And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on s...omeone to make them subtle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doc...trine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder--he as a cheap cabin in the... country, like Monroe, NY the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »