you in the next room is the only thing worth living for

“Sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. Sin gives more chances to desire.”

-Luis Buñuel


“There is a sort of demon that every now and then makes you want to destroy things, just like that. Sometimes I feel like letting myself go, like getting myself into trouble. Everyone’s got a little spider knitting its web inside. Sometimes it wakes up and sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, you want to break things.”

-Catherine Deneuve

“When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy, but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappiness of others? I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That’s what’s at the heart of my music.”

-Nino Rota

“I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”

-Ava Gardner

“I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man. I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”

-Walt Disney

“[Walt Disney] has accomplished something that has defied all the efforts and experiments of the laboratories in zoology and biology. He has given animals souls.”

-William Lyon Phelps


The last day of March,

My darling Sleeping Child, I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I’m not being fancy…I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt - except in your case.

I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed. One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realise to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself.

There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have racked my shabby brains and can find no answer.

But when people die, those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that, for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa.

Ravaged love,

And loving Rich

-Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor



On the increased use of violence in post-war films:

“After the war, there was no longer a sense of family. We no longer loved our flag or honored our country. People no longer believe in hell and brimstone, or even retribution and therefore they do not believe in punishment after they are dead. What could we be afraid of? There was only one thing: physical pain. Physical pain comes from violence and I think today that is the only fact that people really fear. And when we are afraid of violence, then it becomes an element of drama. So, brutality’s now a necessary ingredient of dramatic development and denouement.

We can’t avoid violence because it is everywhere. It should be present in films. But everything depends on the way it is shown. I detest violence when it is shown as a spectacle or when it is used to make us laugh. And that is how it is used more and more on the screen.”

- Fritz Lang, in 1967 interview