Quotes by Richard Schickel

“This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack.”

“That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.”

“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.”

“Elia Kazan: A Biography”

“You feel like its not just a guy up there reading copy that people prepared for him to read. Thats a good quality and increasingly rare in the television climate of our times. Hes something a lot more than just a talking head.”

“There must be other figures who have broadened out in other fields, but not with her energy and focus. Working that hard maybe does something good for you.”

“His work was generally superb,”

“Leone provided that, primarily through stylistic devices, ... One of the things I like about Leones Westerns is that hell spend a very long time on the preliminaries to a gunfight. But then, once they exchange shots, its very quick, much quicker than the typical walk-down in an American Western. All of that preparation is fabulous. Its kind of funny, and its very suspenseful.”

“He was such a vivid character. And it was a character he made up - this slightly ghoulish, heavy-set man who made up jokes on his TV series,”

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.

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