Favorite quotations

Everything makes me nervous – except making films.

Elizabeth Taylor

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I used to live in a sewer. Now I live in a swamp. I’ve come up in the world.

Linda Darnell in No Way Out, 1950

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If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers, 1940

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Men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart.

Marilyn Monroe

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Then, one summer night, she fell from the window of a hotel room. Falling she struck a theater marquee, bounced off it, and rolled under the wheels of a taxi. Above, in the vacated room, police found her shoes, a moneyless purse, an empty whiskey bottle.

‘In Cold Blood’, Truman Capote, 1966

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Were it not for our momentum
The inertia of our actions
The constant inspiration of our habits
We could not continue
“The will is almost nothing,” he said to himself

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Life’s too short to spend seven hours a day in the gym and starving yourself.

Emily Watson on Hollywood’s perception of women as beauty objects

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– I used to be ashamed of the way I lived.
– Did you reform?
– No, I just stopped being ashamed.

Mae West

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Coda

There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest’s for a clam in a shell,
So I’m thinking of throwing the battle
Would you kindly direct me to hell?

Dorothy Parker

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What do you want, Joe, my life’s history?
Here it is in four words: big ideas, small results.

Mae Doyle in ‘Clash by Night’, 1952

I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it
because my loneliness is painful.
But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall,
like seeking love in a whorehouse.

Susan Sontag

Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin’ it.

Scarface, Howard Hawks, 1932

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Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.

Edna O’Brien

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The problem in life is not that good things end it’s that there aren’t new ones right after to replace them.

PBM 2021

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To be happy we must wake up.

Smoke city, Flying away LP, 1997

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I should’ve met you sooner Joe, long ago. It could’ve been so different. Who knows, you might even have fallen for me…

‘Naked Alibi’, Jerry Hopper, 1954 (Feat. Gloria Grahame & Sterling Hayden)

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I am not sick, I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

Frida Kahlo, 1950

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All that is true is rare and difficult.

Alain Badiou

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Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

‘The Lost Daughter’, Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021

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Lava mais mulher suja que água limpa.

Dª. Arminda, Sicó

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A bitter end is better than a bitterness without ending.

‘About Elly’, Asghar Farhad, 2009

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There’s no point in being unhappy about growing older. Just think of the millions who have been denied the privilege.

Cary Grant

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When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist — after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.

George Orwell

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Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, Oscar Wilde, 1891

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But I’m on my way anyhow. All they’ll be doing will be rushing it.

Vera in ‘Detour’, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945

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Robert: What are you gonna do?
Gloria: I’m gonna get off this merry-go-round. I’m so sick of the whole stinking thingh.
Robert: What thing?
Gloria: Life.

‘They shoot horses don’t they?’ Horace McCoy, 1935

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The path out of hell is through misery.

Marsha Linehan

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I was covered in spunk, wet, freezing to death and no one even offered me a towel. When the scene ends, you are worthless.

Karen Lancaume

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Social interactions seem to be mostly about seduction.

‘Film about a woman who…’, Yvonne Rainer, 1974

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To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.

Agnes Martin

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Happiness is not always fun.

‘Fear eats the soul, R.W. Fassbinder, Germany, 1974

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– I’m not perfect neither…
– You deserve better. Better than another broken soul.
– We’re all a little broken. But some pieces still manage to fit together.

‘You’, 2019

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Death Is a Caress

Edith Carlmar, 1949

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First, Hollywood takes your body…and then it takes your soul.
Once it has both of those things, it has no use for you anymore.

Barbara Payton, 1963

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I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.

Sam Shepard

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Vivo numa incerteza trémula.

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Let me tell you the truth. The truth is: ‘what is’. And ‘what should be’ is a fantasy. A terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.

Lenny Bruce

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The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

Émile Zola

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I think that art is of enormous importance in people’s lives, especially for those who have problems.

Persona, Ingmar Bergman, 1965 (nurse Alma)

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What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. Angela Davis on USA

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I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

Andy Warhol

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L’Amour n’est pas aimé.

Hector Bianciotti, 1982, Gallimard

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Good people are always so sure they’re right.

Barbara “Bloody Babs” Graham’s last words before being executed on the 3rd June 1955

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We get more done by not doing what someone else is doing

‘Silence: lectures and writings’ , John Cage

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Randomness is very difficult to achieve… Organization always merges back if you don’t pay attention.

‘La science des rêves’, Michel Gondry, 2006

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There’s Nothing Special About Normal People.

‘Les gens normaux n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, 1993

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Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.

‘Notes sur le cinématographe’, Robert Bresson

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What people should do is to give portable cameras to children and tell them not to obey to any rules. Let them write without worrying about grammar mistakes.

Jean Cocteau

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We don’t live in a poetic world.

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Il y a un moment, dans les séparations, où la personne aimée n’est déjà plus avec nous.

‘L’éducation sentimentale’, Gustave Flaubert

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What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. It’s important to acknowledge that “horrible things” damage you. They don’t make you better, or wiser and stronger. Most of the time they hobble you a bit.

Marian Keyes