Quotes by Subject: Showbiz
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There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting. | |||
The toughest thing about being a success is that you've got to keep on being a success. | |||
Quit now, you'll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you'll be halfway there. | |||
It's only words...unless they're true. | |||
All great stories have three acts. In the first act, the heroes are introduced to great fanfare. In the second, the heroes, on the verge of victory, stumble and take a fall. And in the third act, the heroes return, victorious, to win the battle. | |||
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. | |||
You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well. | * | ||
Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. | |||
A decision will be made before it's too late or soon thereafter. | |||
Analysts have been interring the movie industry since its birth. The funeral choir was enormous after TV took wing, and swelled again as tapes and tape players swept the world aerials. Ditto when cable snaked through the streets and bounced around the world from satellites. Yet last year movie box office revenue was among the greatest ever. Only bad movies can kill the movie business. Great movies will always pack em in. So long as the world turns, though, so will the movie reels. | |||
It's easy to direct while acting - there's one less person to argue with. | |||
I loke the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford. | |||
Anyting but Beethoven. Nobody wants to see a movie about a blind composer. | |||
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness the must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. | |||
Not art passes our conscience the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. | |||
One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that. | |||
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart. | |||
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph. | |||
Luck is where opportunity meets preparation. | |||
People in this country are born thinking they have two inalienable rights. One is to become President of the United States; the other is to direct a major motion picture. | |||
A decision will be made before it's too late or soon thereafter. | |||
I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up. Most people in this business gave up and went on to other things. If you simply didn't give up, you would outlast the people who came in on the bus with you. | |||
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself. | |||
To err is human, but it feels divine. | |||
I don't want any yes-man around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs. | * | ||
Restore the element of trust and respect to those who have earned it and whose passion should inspire you. The most successful network will always be the one with the best collective creative vision - not just that of the chief programmer. | |||
I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie. You have to be different. | |||
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. | |||
Every two or three years I knock off for a while. That way I'm constantly the new girl in the whorehouse. | |||
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. | |||
In Hollywood, all the women are peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally. | |||
A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad. | |||
We must get into this picture business. This is a new industry and a gold mine. It looks like another telephone industry. | |||
An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox. | |||
I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. | |||
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench... a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. | |||
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. | * | ||
Never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. | * | ||
Some men get the world. Others get hookers and a trip to Arizona. (LA Confidential) | |||
It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money. (Citizen Kane, 1940) | |||
I'm just happy to be here and hope I can help the ball club. I'm going to give it my best shot and the good Lord willing, everything will work out. A good friend of mine used to say this is a very simple game. You throw the ball. You catch the ball. You hit the ball. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes it rains. (Tim Robbins as Ebby "Nuke" LaLoosh, Bull Durham, 1988) | |||
Being on a tightrope is living; everything else is waiting. | |||
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I become that person. Or he became me. | * | ||
We're here to ruin ourselves, and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. (Moonstruck, 1987) | |||
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. (All About Eve) | |||
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. (The Third Man, 1949) | |||
In life, to be honest, I've failed as much as I've succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life, and I wish you my kind of success. (screenplay, Jerry Maguie, 1996) | |||
A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better. | |||
Character is action. | |||
When the eagles are silent, the parrots being to jabber. | * | ||
I suppose I should be pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. (American Beauty, screenplay, 1999) | |||
He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander. | |||
Can you believe how many awards shows they have now? They have awards for commercials. The Cleo Awards, a whole show full of commercials. I taped it and then I fast forwarded through the whole thing. | |||
My life is one long obstacle course, with me being the cheif obstacle. | |||
My advice about acting? Speak clearly, don't bump into people, and if you must have motivation, think of your pay packet on Friday. | * | ||
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act. | |||
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous. | |||
A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. | |||
Real heroes are men who fall and fail and are flawed, but win out in the end because they've stayed true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments. | |||
Romance is built on illusion, and when we love someone, we love the illusion they have created for us. | |||
Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in the four c's. They are curiosity, confidence, courage and constancy, and the greatest of these is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestioningly. | |||
Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed. | |||
Be nice to people on your way up because you?ll need them on your way down. | |||
Nothing recedes like success. | |||
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. | |||
Those of you lucky enough to have your lives take them with you! However, leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now. (screenplay, "Kill Bill", 2003) | |||
The multitude of books is making us ignorant. | * | ||
If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes. | |||
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. | |||
Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. | * | ||
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. | |||
When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody. | |||
No good deed goes unpunished. | |||
Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television. | * | ||
Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another. | * | ||
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to. | |||
Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesman. | |||
You walk very slowly and maybe by chance you'll bump into a genius and he'll make you rich. | * | ||
Nuclear war would really set back cable. | |||
Get your criminal attorney now. Should something go south, you won't have the luxury of shopping around. | * | ||
I'm just a girl from a trailer park with a dream. | * | ||
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you are doing is work or play. | |||
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. | |||
If the fans don't wanna come out to the ballpark, no one can stop 'em. | * | ||
Once the people begin to reason, all is lost. | * | ||
All I want is everything. | * | ||
The better the actor the more stupid he is. | |||
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk. | * | ||
Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband; show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil. | |||
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. | * | ||
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. | |||
Real art is without irony. Irony distances the author from his material. Irony is a product of something. It's not the reason for doing something. Irony is a cheap shot. | |||
I'm kind of jealous of the life I'm supposedly leading. | |||
Tradegy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die. | * | ||
I would love to tell my story on Broadway. | * | ||
I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. | * | ||
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. | |||
You're not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi. | |||
Let's have some new cliches. | |||
I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago. | |||
From this milkless tit you have sucked the very business we call show! | * | ||
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. | * | ||
Hollywood, that’s where I could’ve gone if I wasn’t such a punk. If I just learned to bend over and say thank you a little more politely, it could’ve been great. | * | ||
Raising your prices to make up for a shortage in customers and/or an increase in expenses is never wise. You want to raise your prices? You better increase your value. | |||
It's just a case of too soon old and too late smart. | |||
I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. | * | ||
You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles. | |||
Turn your back on the money and start walking toward your your goals. The money is the problem not the solution. Stop using it as an excuse. | |||
*indicates a past Quote of The Week
