Silver Screen Fiend Quotes

“Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“I've been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Take what you need from [films] and get out of the dark once in a while. You’re going to have more of the dark than you can handle, sooner than you think. The thing about the dark is it can never get enough of you.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I remember, reading Stephen King’s On Writing, when he said something about how “your art needs to be a function of your life, not the other way around.” Van Gogh’s art had moved beyond being a “function” of his life and had metastasized into a tumor that was keeping him alive only to kill him more slowly. But in Arles, Vincent decided to take control of his “art.” Except that he made it hurry up with the task of his annihilation.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking…you can sense the fear, excitement, and risk that went into a scene like that. For the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it, and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“...I’m a stone-cold atheist who’s grateful religion exists. All religions. I look at them as a testament to the human race’s imagination, to our ability to invent stories that explain away—or at least make manageable—the nameless terrors, horrific randomness, and utter, galactic meaninglessness of the universe. Is there anything more defiant and beautiful than, when faced with a roaring void, to say “I know a story that fits this quite nicely. And I’m going to use it, pitiless universe, to give meaning and poetry and hope to my days inside this maelstrom into which I’ve, in Joseph Condrad’s words, ‘blundered unbidden’”?”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Dana had one arm. He'd lost the other one to cancer. Being the film freak I was, I never bothered to ask about it further. Or even what his last name was. Not enough time before or between the films. A one-armed schoolteacher, teaching kids in the shitty L.A. school district, probably full of more stories and personality than the electric fables being projected above us. But I was more focused on the mummies and vampires and dinosaurs and aliens to take a deeper interest in an actual, unique human being sitting right next to me. Such was my addiction, at that point. Cut off from the world. A ghost, but breathing and jacketed with flesh.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“It's the kind of movie that makes you realize that each person you glance at, interact with or ignore is an epic film or thrilling novel you'll never get to experience. Makes you bless the grandeur of life and curse it at the same time for being to painfully narrow and brief.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Van Gogh’s paintbrush captured, like a Q-tip swabbing a germ-filled throat culture, a sample of the dirty darkness loose in the air at the end of 1888.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“…some of us had built whole careers - pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Sprocket fiend is the name I have for the subterranean dimension to my film addiction. The subtle, beneath-the-sound-track sound of the clattering projector in those old rep theaters, especially the New Beverly. The defiant, twenty-four-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you're watching, the world's time doesn't apply to you. You're safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock. And the need for that subtle, clicking sprocket time makes you - made me - a sprocket fiend.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film