Joe Eszterhas Quotes
Hungarian - Writer Born: November 23, 1944

Cigarettes are not a part of human behaviour, they are a habit.
Joe Eszterhas

There are no crowds out there demanding to see smoking scenes in movies.
Joe Eszterhas

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.
Joe Eszterhas

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.
Joe Eszterhas

That's sort of what I felt... I miss drinking, I thought bars were truly holy places.
Joe Eszterhas

From what I've been able to determine, many of our big stars are addicted to tobacco. They want to smoke in movies for the same reason I smoked as I wrote, which is that they think their performance is going to be better.
Joe Eszterhas

My father could have been deported because on his immigration application he said that he was a printer, obviously because he didn't want them to be checking his writings.
Joe Eszterhas

I have always been fascinated by the corruption of power.
Joe Eszterhas

Fact is we went on to do other things. But we still wanted to do our success like rock'n'roll stars.
Joe Eszterhas

I have only one loyalty - to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer.
Joe Eszterhas

The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not.
Joe Eszterhas

The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.
Joe Eszterhas

Politics has become entertainment.
Joe Eszterhas

Now on a personal level with things like the California Tax Commission... I really think if people started banding together and saying no to this it could snowball and that could really help.
Joe Eszterhas

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock'n'roll, politics as a movie.
Joe Eszterhas

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.
Joe Eszterhas

I just wanted to make sure that what I write is what appears on screen, to not have some idiot change it on its way to the screen.
Joe Eszterhas

I have my own religious bond with the God in my own head.
Joe Eszterhas

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.
Joe Eszterhas

I always wanted to be a rock'n'roll star.
Joe Eszterhas

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.
Joe Eszterhas

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.
Joe Eszterhas

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.
Joe Eszterhas


Diana Quick Quotes
English - Actress Born: November 23, 1946

Good looks are not something you earn. But as you get older, how you look is a reflection of the life you've led.
Diana Quick

There have been setbacks, illnesses and other obstacles, so inevitably I've had disappointments. But once you realise that things can't always go your own way, you're on the right track to being able to handle your own life.
Diana Quick

I have a cottage near Aldeburgh, and from there it's a sturdy two-mile walk across farmland to an empty beach, where I collect hag stones and run around with the dog. I'm a keen walker, and I love Suffolk's big skies.
Diana Quick

I don't pretend to be happy all the time. I think to be human is to be happy and unhappy by turns. But I have a great capacity to enjoy myself, and it seems to grow as I get older.
Diana Quick

If you try to live as well as you can, then hopefully your face will reflect that. But it's unfair that we put so much pressure on women to look good and then give them so much stick when they go under the knife to achieve this.
Diana Quick

I don't wear much make-up in my non-working life, though I love to dress up and put on a face for a special occasion. As I get older, I see less of the fantasy 'Indian' self I inherited from my father, and I see my mother looking back at me.
Diana Quick

I'd love to play a femme fatale in a film noir. I'm thinking of one of those roles that Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis might have played. What I wouldn't like is to suddenly find myself being cast, as many senior actresses seem to be, as the abbess in a convent.
Diana Quick

I'm a complete addict of The 'X Factor,' so I can see why everyone gets so inspired. But there's a downside to celebrity: your life is up for grabs, your career is much more disposable, and you are therefore vulnerable. It's a high price to pay.
Diana Quick

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.
Diana Quick

When Mary arrived, I felt a mixture of emotions, including panic and overwhelming love. I felt a great sense of responsibility, not just towards my child but also towards her father. There have been many influences on my life, but that thing of finally becoming a family person was the greatest.
Diana Quick

I don't think it's ungracious to seek cosmetic help - it has crossed my mind from time to time, and I have been tempted. But it's too short-term. Once you start down that road, you have to keep going.
Diana Quick

My father was a very warm, gregarious, sociable person who had many interests. He lived his life very much in the present, full of activities and the next project. He had many hobbies. He was not given to retrospection.
Diana Quick

That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.
Diana Quick

I'm an actress, not a celebrity.
Diana Quick

When I was growing up and trying to get my foot on the ladder, I had the self-belief that my mother taught me, and it never occurred to me that anything could go wrong. I've learned life can't be like that.
Diana Quick

I did a couple of sketch shows with Mike Palin and Terry Jones... and then I got hired by Granada to do a weekly topical show.
Diana Quick

What was I like in 1966? I was 19 years old, very confident, and life was a big adventure.
Diana Quick

It's always been fun for me to play a variety of parts, and over the years, I've been lucky with the things I've been asked to do.
Diana Quick

My parents liked to go dancing, and they encouraged all of us to bring our friends home. My brother had a skiffle group, and there would often be dancing in the house. And my parents would come and dance with us.
Diana Quick

'The Discovery of France' by Graham Robb is teaching me lots about a country I've long loved but realise I didn't really know.
Diana Quick

I walked across Tuscany from Siena to Rome, which was a lovely way to see the landscape. It was sunny but not too hot, and we made detours to look at treasures - churches, paintings, little hill villages. The first couple of days, you feel your knees are turning to jelly. But, at the end, you feel very limber. I hope I can always do it.
Diana Quick

I always take an Alastair Sawday guide. I stayed in three or four places in India that they had recommended, and every one of them was wonderful.
Diana Quick

The sheeplike nature of travel - being on a beach with thousands of other people is not my idea of fun. I also don't like being a tourist because you don't know what's really going on in a country.
Diana Quick

As a young actor, I played a lot of 'exotic' parts and was stuck with the tag 'sultry.' I had to refuse such parts if I were ever to play anything else. It did the trick, but my agent feared it made me harder to cast.
Diana Quick

I moved to Kentish Town from Chelsea in 1983, partly because I had a lot of friends already living in the area and because it took an hour off the journey to my house in Suffolk. It has a villagey feel, and it's still a very mixed community, which I like.
Diana Quick

I buy most of my plants from nurseries outside London these days, but there is a man who mysteriously appears each February to sell plants from a derelict site in Market Road. I think he's Greek, but people say he comes from Essex. He vanishes at the end of May only to reappear in December as suddenly as he went.
Diana Quick


Bruce Vilanch Quotes
American - Comedian Born: November 23, 1948

When AIDS hit, lots of people banded together to take care of each other and do what the government wasn't doing. When you grow up Jewish, as I have, you learn that everybody hates you, no one's going to help you, and you have to take care of yourself. That's a great maxim to the gay community, and we took it to heart; we took care of our own.
Bruce Vilanch

Generally with the Oscars or the Emmys there isn't much you can do until the nominations are announced. Then you know what kind of year you're dealing with - what's been overlooked, what the issues are.
Bruce Vilanch

It's really live television, the way God meant it to be.
Bruce Vilanch

I mean, when I started out I was billing per hour, like a shrink because you would sit with somebody and work. But most of it, if it's for a live show it's usually a buy-out. A flat fee.
Bruce Vilanch

Musicals have clearly gotten more physical. You never saw Ethel Merman doing step aerobics.
Bruce Vilanch

The Oscars are about the dynamics of that moment, of that season. It reflects what's been going on in the world every year through the movies. And a lot of times, what's popular at the movies is popular because of what's going on in the world at that moment.
Bruce Vilanch

I have one rave 'New York Times' review framed next to a flop 'Los Angeles Times' review. And it's for the same show. These people watched the same show. That's what happens. They love it, they hate it.
Bruce Vilanch

My assistant says I'm an eBay auction waiting to happen. I have a very large collection of T-shirts... about 4,000 now. Maybe I'll pillage it someday. I have resisted the offers to do a line of T-shirts.
Bruce Vilanch

As I'm always fond of telling hosts at the Oscars who are doing it for their first time, for everybody who wins, there are four people who don't. As the evening wears on, the room fills up with losers, and then they are bitter.
Bruce Vilanch

It's the biggest party in the world, and you have to keep the whole thing percolating, which is difficult because a lot of awards most people don't care about.
Bruce Vilanch

I write screenplays that don't get made and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.
Bruce Vilanch

They make a humongous profit, but the people that work on the shows don't get paid a lot because they're working on the Oscars show. It's the biggest show in the world.
Bruce Vilanch

I do a lot of screen re-writing.
Bruce Vilanch

I've written about 15 screenplays and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches.
Bruce Vilanch

I mean, I've sold all these scripts and nothing's been made. Studios have closed, stars have died. I had a director find Jesus. And the pictures just don't get made.
Bruce Vilanch

Eddie Izzard is absolutely brilliant. I would love to write something for him.
Bruce Vilanch

What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.
Bruce Vilanch

My skirt fell off on stage during a performance of Hairspray on Broadway, revealing my fat suit over my own natural fat suit. I turned to the audience and said, 'Now you know why I spent six years in a square.'
Bruce Vilanch

Every single line on the Oscar show is negotiated. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how it is put together. It's like nothing else on earth. I'm writing a book about it, but I have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells.
Bruce Vilanch

Of course I adored and wanted to be Catwoman. That goes without saying.
Bruce Vilanch

I've got more chins than a San Francisco phonebook.
Bruce Vilanch

I think I intimidate hecklers because I weigh more than most of them.
Bruce Vilanch

I've learned that most of gay America is coupled up, or looking to be. No wonder gay marriage has such traction. So many of us are already in it, so of course we want the legal benefits.
Bruce Vilanch

Who knew we had all this O.C.D. in the world? Well actually, I suppose it's pretty obvious. It explains Sudoku, doesn't it?
Bruce Vilanch

For years, I was compared to Wookiees, especially after I did the 'Star Wars Holiday Special.' I have some photos of me with a few of the Wookiees on the set, and it's hard to tell us apart.
Bruce Vilanch


Steven Brust Quotes
American - Author Born: November 23, 1955

A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.
Steven Brust

The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest.
Steven Brust

Always speak politely to an enraged Dragon.
Steven Brust

To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.
Steven Brust

Minneapolis has two seasons: Road Removal and Snow Repair.
Steven Brust

Just because they really are out to get you doesn't mean you aren't paranoid.
Steven Brust

No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style.
Steven Brust

But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.
Steven Brust

Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching?
Steven Brust

Every once in while, a person will do something obvious and direct that is no more than it appears to be. I think they do it to throw you off.
Steven Brust

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.
Steven Brust

There are millions of ways for people to die, if you number each vital organ, each ways it can fail, all the poisons from the earth and the sea which can cause these failures.
Steven Brust

I'd rather be running the game than playing it.
Steven Brust

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.
Steven Brust