Duke Haney > Duke's Quotes

“Baby one night somebody
Going to strike a match on a tombstone
And read your name.”
― Frank Stanford, Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. ”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.”
― Oscar Levant

“The function of man is to live, not to exist.”
― Jack London

“I once heard someone say, "I shall die very young. How young? I don’t know. Maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.”
― Diana Vreeland

“Opinions are like some kind of crust that grows on top of things and you want to kind of peel them off.”
― Susan Sontag

“Unscrew the locks from the doors !
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! ”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans -- the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blueprint. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress -- but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.”
― Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Life was precious. Life was all that mattered. Yet it meant nothing if you weren't living as you wanted.”
― Edward Bunker, No Beast So Fierce

“I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. ”
― Virginia Woolf

“A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.”
― Norman Mailer

“Beds are dangerous. More people die in bed than anywhere else.”
― W.C. Fields

“I think at the moment we die, we are the sum of all the good and bad we've done, all the courage and cowardice we've exercised. And so, for example, if we die with a desire to be reborn, I think it means a great deal to God. If you will, it's like reaching into a litter to select a pup, and there's one who catches our eye because he wants us. He is the one we choose to take home. Using that crude analogy, I would say it's important to be ready. After all, that is the one situation we can't simulate, can't preempt.”
― Norman Mailer

“By and large, I feel that the more interesting work in the field of murder is done by amateurs. They are people who perform their work with dignity and good taste, leavened with a sense of the grotesque. There is polite and wholesome mayhem, practiced by civilized people, and I personally enjoy it.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“Optimism is cowardice.”
― Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

“I've seen enough films. I don't want to see any more. I get far less out of seeing films than I do out of reading books. So I've got about a billion books to get through before I see another film.”
― Ken Russell

“I'd hate their guts if they had any.”
― Audie Murphy

“Most people, no matter how brilliant, are vessels. Once you come to the end of what is interesting in them, you can touch the side of the jar. There will be nothing afterward but repetition of what you have learned already. It might take a night, a year, or half a lifetime, but once you can reach the side of the vessel, a good part of the larger feeling is gone.”
― Norman Mailer, The Time of our Time

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
― Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.”
― Oscar Levant

“Part of growing up is developing a bullshit detector, and kids usually do a pretty fair job of wising each other up.”
― Pauline Kael, Movie Love: Film Writings, 1988-1991

“Our minds race ahead of us and summon strangers.”
― Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings

“Beware the milk when the cow is free.”
― Duke Haney, Death Valley Superstars: Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland

“Great, I thought. The afterlife is just like Hollywood, with nobodies passing themselves off as somebodies. My ongoing strategy of postponing death had been vindicated.”
― Duke Haney, Death Valley Superstars: Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland

“A corpse with a little meat on it will always bring out the steak knives in Hollywood.”
― Duke Haney, Death Valley Superstars: Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland

“It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way.”
― Edie Sedgwick