“I remember one time I'm batting against the Dodgers in Milwaukee. They lead, 2 - 1, it's the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two out and the pitcher has a full count on me. I look over to the Dodger dugout and they're all in street clothes.” Legendary Bob Uecker
“Mort Sahl, while attending a preview of Otto Preminger's film Exodus, stood up and called out, "Otto, let my people go!”
“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing: And Other Essays
“To be a songwriter-singer means the songs come from deep within, and you treat them as an artist, with that much respect. I couldn’t cheat myself.” – Roy Orbison
“Without the word dream, or the concept dream, and without the word blue and the emotions, I would have been really limited in the things I’ve written and performed.” – Roy Orbison
"Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes." -Jim Carrey
As Arthur (born Adolph) Marx never spoke in his films, I figured I'd just post some quotes by him...
"I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived."
"The man who first inspired me was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theater. He rolled cigars in the window of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. When he got going good he was completely lost in work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves. Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I've thrown in a Gookie at least once."
Talking about working in vaudeville: "If an audience didn't like us, we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching - until (the Marx Brothers' mother and manager) Minnie gave us the high-sign that we'd collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing stuff back at the audience and run like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down."
"Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After a while you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid."
"When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself."
"If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it."
@edgarblythe,
“If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too.”
--Tom Waits
...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (Sherlock Holmes)
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
@edgarblythe,
For me, "Catch 22" stands equally alongside "1984" and "Brave New World"
“It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'”
— Aldous Huxley
