The inevitable effect of a biographer’s hindsight is to belittle the subject’s foresight.
The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-’60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.
I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn’t go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You’d like to write phrases that people can’t forget as soon as they read them.
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Stop worrying – nobody gets out of this world alive.
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s in Hamburger Technology.
The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that’s why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.
Whoever called snooker “chess with balls” was rude, but right.
All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like – Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything – but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.
Little books are the things to write at my age, I’ve decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.
Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there’s a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!