Richard Condon Quotes

I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now.

Although the paranoiacs make the great leaders, it's the resenters who make their best instruments because the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins.

Cheese. The adult form of milk.

What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.

The human comedy begins with a vertical smile.

Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there's absolutely nothing else to do.

Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.

Over-eating is the most worthy of sins. It neither breaks up marriages nor causes road accidents.

I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.

In Mexico the gods ruled, the priests interpreted and interposed, and the people obeyed.In Spain, the priests ruled, the king interpreted and interposed, and the gods obeyed. A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.

When I was a Hollywood press agent, I learned how the Hollywood casting system worked. There was a roster of actors who were always perfect as doctors or lawyers or laborers, and the directors just picked the types they needed and stuffed them into film after film. I do the same [with my characters], book after book.

Made by General Motors, on order from Sears Roebuck.