[Hoffman actually had to lose weight to play the famously egg-shaped socialite. He also had to lose some height and change his deep baritone into the writer's high-pitched wheeze.] I needed every minute of it, ... The most important thing was internal -- to somehow understand very specifically why and how he did what he did. It couldn't have been easy being that guy, basically. |
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet. |
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet. |
A film like that takes it out of you. You have to have that thing. You have to find it and keep it and walk it out of the trailer and across the parking lot and it has to last 12 hours. I wondered, at a certain point, if I was fit enough. |
Adorned with cape, with tricorn, saintly soul singing in librarian tones an enameled song that coolly celebrates her chewing-gum enthusiasms. |
All literature is gossip. |
Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably. |
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. |
Fame is only good for one thing-they will cash your check in a small town. |
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. |
Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends. |
He [Mick Jagger] moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire. |
Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." |
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. |
I am sorry that it has been found necessary to cut the story, however, this seems to me to have been done not unintelligently, for which I am grateful. Nevertheless, I have, here and there, restored a few of these elisions, and made equivalent cuts elsewhere. |