Stephen Baker > Stephen's Quotes

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“For her part, Kelly expressed warm feelings about Cooper as well. “He’s the one who taught me to relax during a scene and let the camera do some of the work,” she would recall. “On the stage you have to emote not only for the front rows, but for the balcony too, and I’m afraid I overdid it. He taught me the camera is always in the front row, and how to take it easy.”
― Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

“Around their mounds, they dug scores of miles of watercourses on the order of Venetian canals; one allowed them to punt their craft two and a half miles across Pine Island between the sound and Matlacha Pass, saving themselves from a ten-mile paddle around either end of the island.”
― Jack Emerson Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea

“Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile. He was like one of Picasso’s great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves.”
― Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

“She’s a ball buster,” Robbie said. “I told her that. I said you don’t care what I think. You interview somebody with a name, you just want to cut off his balls, make him look like a wimp. You know what she said? She said, ‘I don’t have to cut ’em, they come off in my hand.”
― Elmore Leonard, Split Images: A Crime Noir Thriller – A Detroit Detective Hunts a Palm Beach Playboy Killer

“Yet neither those celebrating Alexander as a protoimperialist nor those condemning him as such do justice to his history. Both tend to understand him by reading history backward, extrapolating from later, better-documented empires to that of the Macedonian king.”
― Rachel Kousser, Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great

“Just because someone has made you a shepherd for the sake of the flock, did he hand over that flock to be skinned at your pleasure?”
― Adam Nicolson, Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War

“There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous,” John Adams wrote Abigail. “I am ashamed of the age I live in.” Yet”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777