Richard Schickel Quotes

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

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

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.

He who does not like you will defame you in jest.

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.

Luck always favors the comely.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

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

Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representationof contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation ofanything - except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting uprightin a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.

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

The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.