Joe Eszterhas Quotations

My hands are bloody; so are Hollywood's. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don't wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it upon millions of others.

I don't smoke or drink, I walk 5 miles a day and I'm on a nearly vegetarian diet. In some ways, my great lifelong love of sports has gotten me through this period and when ESPN came to me with this idea, I immediately saw it as part of my recovery.

What it is about, at its core, is a young woman making very moral choices. And my suspicion is young women will love this movie as much as they loved 'Flashdance,'

What I want to say to teenagers is, 'Do everything you can to see this movie, use your false I.D.'s and do what ever it is you have to do. Because not only will you love the rock 'n' roll parts of it and the dance parts of it, but the message, which is you don't have to sell your soul in order to stay alive, is one that will echo in the hearts of teenagers everywhere.

The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not.

Now on a personal level with things like the California Tax Commission... I really think if people started banding together and saying no to this it could snowball and that could really help.

Actually, I didn't know that. I like to name my characters after baseball players. Alan Trammell of the Tigers is one of my favorites.

I've had to change my lifestyle radically during my two-year struggle,

I'm haunted by the fact that I may have caused lives to be lost.

Don't smoke. Don't kill yourselves. Don't maim yourselves. Tell your friends. Please don't smoke.

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.

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 .

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 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.

They do the same thing [with cigarette] that they do in the kind of action picture where you know 200 people are killed and then there's no pain.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

I began my addiction when I was 12 years old. By the time 40, 45 years later, when it, you know, it threatened my life and maimed me in terms of my voice, I was so addicted that I was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.

There's no doubt in my mind that Bill Clinton will stop smoking cigars, will never smoke them again, as a result of what he did with that cigar.

Certainly on a political and a legislative level, Bill Clinton was effective, but the example that he ultimately left, I think for posterity, tragically, is going to begin with that single paragraph lead with the White House intern.

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.

I was very skeptical when he began, and there have been moments where I think he's shown absolute leadership, and I think the jury is out, still out. I haven't made any final decisions on him, but I've been surprised at times. I agree with him about one thing absolutely-George W. Bush said recently that he believed in prayer and exercise. So do I.

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.

I haven't really spoken to God since I was a boy and I've rediscovered god and prayer in the process and all of that has come together.

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.

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'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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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

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

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock'n'roll, politics as a movie.

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

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 started making a point earlier that women's cancer rates are skyrocketing, and we have some women movie stars, young women movie stars, who are smoking in many of their movies.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

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 have always been fascinated by the corruption of power.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I'm not suggesting at all that we take away all of the characters' vices. I am suggesting that this particular vice is so insidious, so nefarious, and so deadly that simply by glamorizing it or poisoning our young adults, and I think it's a very separate category, but in no way am I suggesting that we move on from banning smoking in movies to banning drinking, or whatever else we want to do.

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.

From what I've been able to determine, many of our big stars are addicted to tobacco. They want to smoke in movies for the same reason I smoked as I wrote, which is that they think their performance is going to be better.

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

I do want to make a special appeal to women movie stars to, I think, have a special responsibility these days to stop smoking, not to do it up on screen because the example that's being set is really an awful example.

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

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

A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

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.

Politics has become entertainment.

Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

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