Joe Eszterhas Quotes

I have always been fascinated by the corruption of power.

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

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.

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

The charm of smoking a cigarette from the point of view of the people who smoked them, and I was one of those people for many, many years, is an amazing pleasure and a hit that some people say, and I've never done heroin, but some people say that it rivals the heroin hit, so there is that pleasure. The-it kills you the same way that heroin kills you.

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

Politics has become entertainment.

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

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

Let's make Joe Lieberman accountable for his rhetoric. Not a penny more until he 'clarifies' his position to the satisfaction of our creative freedom.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think that Hollywood is sort of guilty of having a moral blind eye on this subject. While at the same time, you know, being involved in a lot of liberal causes and being involved very militantly, Hollywood is, in fact, guilty of helping to addict people to smoke.

Assuming that all bad girls smoke. I don't think so. I've been around a lot of bad girls who don't smoke, you know, so I think it's easy to put a cigarette into, you know, into anyone's hands and say, well that makes them a bad boy or a bad girl. There are many more creative ways from a writerly point of view to do that.

There are some young women movie stars who are doing it everywhere, smoking in every movie, sometimes even with placements with a pack of cigarettes.

If they gave a Nobel Peace Prize for work against big tobacco, not just in the industry, but also with the California tax initiative, he really deserves one.

Before I would view Rob Reiner as this really annoying pest. Every time he'd come on TV or talking about smoking, I found my blood pressure go up. I just met-really met Rob for the first time last week and told him how much I admire him. He's done more than anyone else in the industry.

All has changed, thanks to Joe Eszterhas' life-threatening battle with throat cancer. He announced in "The New York Times" that he and Hollywood had blood on their hands and now Eszterhas is crusading to stop Hollywood's glamorization of smoking.

What Hollywood has done through the years is glamorized it even more, made it sexy, made it sensuous, and dwelled on those pleasure aspects, completing ignoring the fact that Hollywood as an industry, was pointing the gun at young people - pointing a gun at them when they were 12 to 14 years.

The-one of the odd things that's going on with smoking these days is that in the '90s, smoking at movies in the '90s, there were more movies showing smoking than there were in the '60s.

I was surprised by how warm the response was, even among studio heads, who said they really, we do have to do something about glamourization of smoking.

There are certainly a lot of sins to be taken on. To take on smoking and movies is a weighty enough thing, I think, and it's one I've experienced, and it's what's caused me to live in-with my voice maimed for the rest of my life.

I will focus on smoking in movies and with the amount of time that I have left in the world, I will do the best I can to stop smoking in movies and also to help people stop smoking, just normal ordinary people who may need help.

I think it's terrible to show that to kids. It's - I think you should - if you - if you do a piece where something violent happens and someone dies or is badly injured, you must show the pain.

You must show how gruesome that death is because if you don't, then you turn into some kind of comic book and pain, then death, doesn't have a consequence, and pain doesn't have a consequence.

I think to put death on screen where it isn't that turns it into comic book time and there I think by desensitizing an audience, you really do open the possibility that someone is going to kill.

Joe Lieberman was threatening censorship. What I'm arguing is that if the creative people in Hollywood themselves have a responsibility, have a moral responsibility in terms of smoking, not to show smoking in movies.

No one is going to tell a movie star to smoke or not smoke because they can do whatever they want.

Joe Lieberman frightens me. Why should we, an Hollywood voter, donate money to a man who threatens our creative freedom, our freedom of expression.

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

I always try to do true endings and that's where I got into trouble always because Hollywood wants to do happy endings.

I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings. I am admitting this only because I have made a deal with God. Spare me, I said, and I will try to stop others from committing the same crimes I did.

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

Anyone I think who - that would go through a cancer ward and would see the result of what smoking does, would never, ever think of smoking is sexy again.

Sirens wailed; the revolution had come to Harrisonville. Blood was flowing on Pearl Street.

Actors always loved props and-so instead of a hat or an umbrella, they feel really comfortable with a cigarette as a prop.

Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .

I think the main issue is that a lot of the stars today are very addicted, and they simply feel more comfortable smoking as they act.

Now the cigarette companies claim that they don't do that [ pay to have their product advertised in movies ] anymore, although it certainly makes you wonder a bit when an independent production like "In The Bedroom", you know, seems to focus constantly on Marlboros and almost it turns into a Marlboro ad, whether there was any money exchanged.

In the olden days, of course, cigarette companies would pay to have their product advertised in movies and to have actors smoke cigarettes.[Ronald Reagan used to do it.]

I changed my diet completely. You know, I'm from Cleveland, so I've always loved sausage and red meat and all of that stuff, so now I find myself not eating any of that, no red meat, no sausage. It's basically a vegetarian diet with a little bit of fish. I drink quarts of carrot juice, quarts of cranberry juice, endless amounts of water and nothing else.

I think one of the things that I was struck by was that Joe has the financial wherewithal to go check into some expensive clinic, go into rehab and beat these addictions but he didn't. He sort of designed his own, you know, sort of rehabilitation at home. And anybody could do what he did. When he felt like having a cigarette after he ate, he would get up and walk. At cocktail hour when he used to have a drink and watch the news, he stopped watching the news. He couldn't. He couldn't watch the news and not have a drink and a cigarette. He would walk.

Cigarettes, cigarettes were much tougher. Booze was tough And I had a real drinking problem before as we discovered in the hospital really, but the cigarettes are much tougher and to tell you the truth.

I've seen Joe take on many battles, cancer being one of them, and the determination that he has, and he won't stop, he's not going to make one announcement and write one editorial and go away.

Bill Klinton was the ultimate rock star as president. I don't think as a result of his presidency we will ever have a rock star as president again. In the same way that we will never get involved in another Vietnam.