From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.

The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.