Richard Schickel Quotations

Leone provided that, primarily through stylistic devices. One of the things I like about Leone's Westerns is that he'll spend a very long time on the preliminaries to a gunfight. But then, once they exchange shots, it's very quick, much quicker than the typical walk-down in an American Western. All of that preparation is fabulous. It's kind of funny, and it's very suspenseful.

Leone provided that, primarily through stylistic devices, ... One of the things I like about Leone's Westerns is that he'll spend a very long time on the preliminaries to a gunfight. But then, once they exchange shots, it's very quick, much quicker than the typical walk-down in an American Western. All of that preparation is fabulous. It's kind of funny, and it's very suspenseful.

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.

He was such a vivid character. And it was a character he made up - this slightly ghoulish, heavy-set man who made up jokes on his TV series.

You feel like it's not just a guy up there reading copy that people prepared for him to read. That's a good quality and increasingly rare in the television climate of our times. He's something a lot more than just a talking head.

First of all people have to tune in and stay with it no matter what the format is. And this is a year in which none of the contending pictures are big, across the board hits.

This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack.

There must be other figures who have broadened out in other fields, but not with her energy and focus. Working that hard maybe does something good for you.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Luck always favors the comely.

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

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.