Richard Schickel Quotes

"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."

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

"This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack."

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

"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."

"Memory is the personal journalism of the soul."

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

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

"Elia Kazan: A Biography"

"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."