Richard Schickel Quotes

#1. Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Harold Bloom

#2. There is a limbo of the lost through which American males of a certain age and status almost inevitably must pass these days.

Richard Schickel

#3. A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.

Richard Schickel

#4. I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.

Robert Walser

#5. The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.

Richard Schickel

#6. A beaver does not, as legend would have it, know which direction the tree will fall when he cuts it, but counts on alacrity to make up for lack of engineering expertise.

Ann Zwinger

#7. A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

Richard Schickel

#8. That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.

Richard Schickel

#9. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

Julianna Baggott

#10. This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack.

Richard Schickel

#11. This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.
only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.

Sanober Khan

#12. I play a man who is obsessed with his own beauty, so it's perfect casting.

Alex Pettyfer

#13. He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

Richard Schickel

#14. Divorced, not loving their abandoned children as much as they loathe their former wives, directing a combination of need and hostility toward the women who drift in and out of their new lives, they are, as [one character] puts it, involved in a variety of pharmaceutical experiments.

Richard Schickel

#15. He who does not like you will defame you in jest.

Richard Schickel

#16. Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representationof contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation ofanything - except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting uprightin a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.

Richard Schickel

#17. Epictetus, I think, said not to be concerned with death, because life is the presence of feeling and emotion and awareness, and death is the absence of all of that, which means you won't have any awareness. So why worry about it ?

Richard Schickel

#18. The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

Richard Schickel

#19. Love gives one a kind of goodness.

Alexandre Dumas-fils

#20. No one teaches mindfulness better than Thich Nhat Hanh.

B. J. Gallagher Hateley

#21. If you try to stay young forever, you don't really live.

Elizabeth Mitchell

#22. Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

Richard Schickel

#23. Luck always favors the comely.

Richard Schickel