"Baked beans keep me going all right but green beans are my enemy food."
--Emma Donoghue, Room, 2010

"Writing, as a means of expression, has to compete with talking. The talker need not rely wholly on what he says. He has the help of his mobile face and hands, and of his voice, with its various inflexions and its variable pace, whereby he may insinuate fine shades of meaning...but the writer? For his every effect he must rely wholly on the words ( Read more... )

If I say slide, get dirty
If I say stay, don't run
--Jill Bialosky, "Manhood," The Players, 2015

"I wasn't a quick learner. I'd always been okay at counting--I had fingers like the other kids--but always a little disappointed by arithmetic itself. I thought multiplying would mean more than adding over and over again."
--Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet, 2010

"Why would a plant care about Mozart? And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light, isn't that enough?"
--ethnobotanist Tim Plowman, on the pseudo-science of The Secret Life of Plants (1973)

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"I did have interludes of monogamy with a few women....Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties."
--Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, 2008

I enjoy writing about movies in this space. I think I do a decent job of explaining why certain films and filmmakers are inspired and why others fall short. One way or another, I've been trying to wrap my head around film as an art form, actively engaging the works I see with creative, analytical thinking, for more than twenty years. I'm no ( Read more... )

I am very short on time for reasons I will address more directly tomorrow. For now, let me just divert your attention with a placeholder post that also preserves a piece I'd like to remember.

I don't agree with everything New York Times film writer Mahnola Dargis says, but I sure admire the intellectual perspective that she brings to her ( Read more... )

For reasons I will go into in the near future, tonight I feel the need to remind myself why I like Sir Anthony Hopkins. This quote will do nicely ( Read more... )

I post this largely in the hope that firthofforth will see it and find it pleasing.

“I’ve been an atheist all my life but I always knew that if my mum asked me when she was dying if there was a heaven I’d say yes. I’d lie. I think that’s how religion started - as a good lie."
--Ricky Gervais, quoted in an interview, though I found it somewhere else