Novels, with a few famous exceptions, usually pretend that we have never read a novel before in our lives, and may never read anot...her after this one. Movies, on the other hand, tend to assume that we spend every waking moment at the pictures, that anyone who has found his or her way to the cinema is a moviegoer, a regular, an addict.... Movies rely on our experience of other movies, on a living tradition of the kind that literary critics always used to be mourning for, because it died in the seventeenth century or fizzled out with D.H. Lawrence. The movie tradition, of course, specializes in light comedy, well-made thrillers, frothy musicals, and weepy melodramas, rather than in such works as Donne's Holy Sonnets or George Eliot's Middlemarch; and we shouldn't listen too seriously to the siren voices of those critics who claim big things for Hollywood movies as art. But there is a tradition. We have in our heads as we sit in the cinema a sense of all the films we have seen, a range of common reference which is the Greek and Latin of the movies, our classical education.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Annie: Dances like Pavaliver, that child. George Grainger: Dances like who?... Annie: Pavaliver--the Russian dancer. Don't be so ignorant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
George the first was an honest, dull, German gentleman, as unfit as unwilling to act the part of a king, which is to shine and to ...oppress. Lazy and inactive even in his pleasures, which were therefore lowly sensual. He was coolly intrepid, and indolently benevolent. He was diffident of his own parts, which made him speak little in public, and prefer in his social, which were his favourite, hours the company of wags and buffoons. Even his mistress, the duchess of Kendal, with whom he passed most of his time, and who had all influence over him, was very little above an idiot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jenny: I like different music for different things. I like to listen to rock. I like to dance to jazz. George: What do you li...ke to do to Prokofiev? Jenny: Fuck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Y'know, George, I feel that in a small way we're doing something important. It's satisfying a fundamental urge. It's deep in the r...ace for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace. And we're helping him get those things in our shabby little office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He rememb...ered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
George Peatty: Tell me something, wouldya Sherry? Just tell me one thing. Why did you ever marry me anyway? Sherry Peatty: Oh..., George. When a man has to ask his wife that, well, he just hadn't better, that's all. Why talk about it? Maybe it's all to the good in the long run. After all, if people didn't have headaches what would happen to the aspirin industry?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »