Quotes from Budd Schulberg

They looked at each other until they weren't acquaintances any longer.

I'd like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don't entertain, nobody's listening.

Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.

I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion.

I believed him because the truth is never hard to recognize. Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

We only hate the results of people. But people, Henry, aren't just results. They're a process.

A la mierda! ¡El que quiera leer a Rimbaud que aprenda francés!

When we left, the sun was taking its evening dip, slipping down into the ocean inch by inch like a fat woman afraid of the water.

There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed, afraid to look back and see where they've come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel.

Nize baby, et op all de screenplay.

You're physically incapable of having friends. All you can ever have are enemies and stooges.

I know the goddam trouble with me, I thought. Enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft berth, indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.

He was one of those magnificent fakes who could overwhelm himself with his own sincerity.

The principal furniture in Billie's mind was a good-sized bed.

Jesus had many lovers of the kingdom of heaven but precious few bearers of his cross. Father Barry read on: … Interrogate

All people seem to do is the best they can to get along and have a good time; and if that means keeping what they've got, they're liable to become fascists; and if it means trying to get what they need and don't have, there's a good chance of their learning the Internationale.

We're sorry for him because a germ he didn't have anything to do with got inside him and twisted him out of shape. Maybe we ought to feel the same way about guys with twisted egos.

You—stink," I ended lamely, so sore I couldn't even try to be clever. "Okay, I stink," he said, walking off, "but someday you'll cut off an arm for one little whiff.

how would you account for the mail Sammy drew from all over the country? From insurance companies in Hartford, from chain stores in the South, from mail-order houses in the Middle West, people were writing that I could not have written Sammy without personal knowledge of their own mail-room boy who had run over their backs to become office manager, and in some cases company president.

Everybody does it." No, not everybody does it; conscience and social responsibility are still alive if not too well in America. But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even seeming to realize that suffering is involved.

It made me uncomfortable. I guess I've always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.

Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.