Top 31 Paddy Chayefsky Quotes
#1. I'm afraid to look in the mirror. I'm afraid I'm going to see an old lady with white hair, just like the old ladies in the park. Alittle bundle in a black shawl just waiting for the coffin.
Paddy Chayefsky
#3. All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.
Paddy Chayefsky
#5. Howard Beale is processed, instant God, and right now it looks like he might just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore.
Paddy Chayefsky
#6. Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#7. I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.
Paddy Chayefsky
#10. His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram ... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history ... and then he was promptly ... simply ... forgotten to death.
Paddy Chayefsky
#11. The best thing that can happen is for the theme to be nice and clear from the beginning.
Paddy Chayefsky
#12. Television is the menace that everyone loves to hate but can't seem to live without.
Paddy Chayefsky
#13. We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived ... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
Paddy Chayefsky
#14. Americans don't want drama, especially good drama, they just want their boredom killed.
Paddy Chayefsky
#15. We are a gutted generation, born in the depression and obsessed with prosperity.
Paddy Chayefsky
#16. I don't know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about truth. I just want to know the momentary fact of things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual. It's sensual. It's alive!
Paddy Chayefsky
#17. I'm a flaming faggot, Irving. I was sure you were on to that. I don't go around waving the flag, of course, and I definitely do not proselytize. Homosexuality is, to me, an inner satisfaction, a pride in a heritage of greatness. To marry a woman would be an inadmissible rejection of my identity.
Paddy Chayefsky
#18. Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#20. God save us from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.
Paddy Chayefsky
#21. You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.
Paddy Chayefsky
#23. This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings
Paddy Chayefsky
#24. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
Paddy Chayefsky
#26. Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.
Paddy Chayefsky
#27. Ma, sooner or later there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts. And one fact I've got to face is whateverit is women like, I ain't got it.
Paddy Chayefsky
#28. Television is god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business.
Paddy Chayefsky
#29. You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
Paddy Chayefsky
#30. I don't want to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.[ ... ]You've got to say 'I'm a human being, god dammit! My life has value!
Paddy Chayefsky
#31. The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.
Paddy Chayefsky
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