I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish mu...
Margo Channing: Why so remote Addison? I should think you'd be at your protégé's side lending her moral support. Addison DeWitt: Miss Caswell at the moment is where I can lend no support, moral or otherwise. Margo Channing: In the lady's, shall we ...
Brother Gaspar de Carvajal: 'Thou lettest man flow on like a river, and Thy years know no end. As for man, his days are like grass as a flower on the field, so he blossoms. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall kno...
Walter Chalmers: Lieutenant, don't try to evade the responsibility. In your... parlance, you blew it. You knew the significance of his testimony, yet you failed to take adequate measures to protect him. So to you, it was a job, no more. Were it more,...
Lotte Schwartz: I think it's kinda sexy that John Malkovich has a portal, y'know, sort of like, it's like, like he has a vagina. It's sort of vaginal, y'know, like he has a, he has a penis AND a vagina. I mean, it's sort of like... Malkovich's... fem...
General Sternwood: You knew him too? Philip Marlowe: Yes, in the old days, when he used to run rum out of Mexico and I was on the other side. We used to swap shots between drinks, or drinks between shots, whichever you like. General Sternwood: My res...
Leigh Anne Touhy: Sean and I have been talking and Michael, if you're gonna accept a football scolarship we think it should be to Tennesee. And I promise that I will be at every game cheering for you. Michael Oher: Every game. Leigh Anne Touhy: Every...
Buck Laughlin: [as the hound judge examines a Borzoi] Now that looks like a fast dog. Is that faster than a greyhound? Trevor Beckwith: Uhh... I can't really say... Buck Laughlin: If you put them in a race, who would come in first? You know if you ha...
Short stories have no net. The writer cannot take a leisurely sixty pages to get things moving, or make a side trip onto a barely related subject, or slack off in the last forty pages. Everything is right now, right here, in the reader's grasp and mi...
I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the...
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could b...
People are like water: Many rush pass you, as some will over-flood. Some will drown you, or force you to go their current ways. Some will be cold or hot-tempered, but try to say with the warm ones. Some will come as a raging wave and cause a ripple, ...
I was shocked to read that Lord Ferrers, a Home Office minister, when booked for speeding and presented with a £40 fixed penalty with three penalty points, them wrote to the Suffolk police to thank them for catching him. There is a sickness in Engla...
I picked ducks in a tub in my dorm room. I'd hang deer in the doorway between the bedroom and the little living room in our little apartment there, and I'd skin my deer, and all the guts would go in the tub, and I'd sneak them out so my fellow studen...
I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn’t even know th...
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to d...
So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit in one of those all-night-into-mornings cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium...
At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn...pauses briefly to stra...
Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch'...
In medieval times, contrary to popular belief, most knights were bandits, mercenaries, lawless brigands, skinners, highwaymen, and thieves. The supposed chivalry of Charlemagne and Roland had as much to do with the majority of medieval knights as the...
One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As h...
