Stamp of a Writer: Margaret Mitchell

The following quotes of Margaret Mitchell have been taken from an interview she gave Mrs. Medora Perkerson of The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine and broadcast over radio station WSB, Atlanta, Georgia, on July 3, 1936. The interview was published for the first time in a digital format at PBS. You can watch the full documentary, Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel, here and read the full text of her interview here. The Civil War had a major influence on her life and shaped her only major work.

"My novel (Gone With the Wind) is the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time."

"When I was a child I had to hear a lot about the Civil War on Sunday afternoons when I was dragged hither and yon to call on elderly relatives and friends of the family who had fought in the war or lived behind the lines. When I was a little girl, children were not encouraged to express their personalities by running and screaming on Sunday afternoons. When we went calling, I was usually scooped up onto a lap, told that I didn't look like a soul on either side of the family and then forgotten for the rest of the afternoon while the gathering spiritedly refought the Civil War." 

© Library of Congress

"While I’m talking about knees and laps, that cavalry knees were the worst knees of all. Cavalry knees had the tendency to trot and bounce and jog in the midst of reminiscences and this kept me from going to sleep."

"If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose is the theme of survival. What quality is it that makes some people able to survive catastrophes and others, apparently just as brave and able and strong, go under? I have always been interested in this particular quality in people. We've all seen the same thing happen in the present depression. It happens in every social upheaval, in wars, in panics, in revolutions."

P.S.: Margaret Mitchell was only 49 when she died of injuries sustained after a speeding car knocked her down while crossing Peachtree Street, Atlanta, on August 11, 1949.


For 24 previous Celebrity Stamps, see under Labels.

Stamp of a Writer: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

This year marks the completion of 75 years of the publication of The Yearling by American author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953). The novel, which is now included in the young-adult or teen fiction category, was written in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize a year later. It was made into a film in 1946, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.

Rawlings lived in rural Florida which shaped much of her writing that includes many short stories and novels which, apart from her best-known work The yearling, include South Moon Under (1933) and Cross Creek (1942). The 1932 Gal Young Un short story won the O. Henry Award First Prize.

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in Cross Creek, Florida, will celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Yearling with several programmes planned from April 2012 to April 2013.  

"Even after 75 years, this story of a young boy and his pet fawn, as they mature from one spring to the next in the Florida scrub, rings with authenticity and life," the Historic State Park said.

According to the Park's website, "Visitors to this Florida homestead can walk back in time to 1930s farm life where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked in the tiny community of Cross Creek. Her cracker style home and farm, where she lived for 25 years and wrote her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Yearling, has been restored and is preserved as it was when she lived here." 

The United States Postal Service released the above commemorative stamp in 2008 honouring Rawlings and the literary arts. In 2007, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and farm yard was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Below are a few of her quotes that include lines from The Yearling and Cross Creek.

"Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts."

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

"Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever." 

"You know what I wisht I had, Ma? A pouch like a 'possum, to tote things."

“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.” 

“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.” 

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”

For previous Celebrity Stamps, look under Labels.

Stamp of a Writer: Louisa May Alcott

Most of the quotes below have been compiled from Louisa May Alcott's books including Little Women, Jo's Boys, Work: A Story of Experience, Moods, and Behind A Mask (or A Woman's Power) which was originally published in 1866 under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard.

"Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable." 

"I am she; come in, friend; I am glad to see thee," said the old lady, smiling placidly, as she led the way into a room whose principal furniture seemed to be books, flowers, and sunshine."

"A pleasant little scene. Bella working busily, and near her in a low chair, with the light falling on her fair hair and delicate profile, sat Miss Muir, reading aloud. "Novels!" thought Sir John, and smiled at them for a pair of romantic girls. But pausing to listen a moment before he spoke, he found it was no novel, but history, read with a fluency which made every fact interesting, every sketch of character memorable, by the dramatic effect given to it. Sir John was fond of history, and failing eyesight often curtailed his favorite amusement. He had tried readers, but none suited him, and he had given up the plan. Now as he listened, he thought how pleasantly the smoothly flowing voice would wile away his evenings, and he envied Bella her new acquisition."

"I like good strong words that mean something."

"I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous, that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream."

"That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit." 

"If all literary women had such thoughtful angels for husbands, they would live longer and write more. Perhaps that wouldn't be such a blessing to the world though, as most of us write too much now."

"I strolled about, enjoying myself, till I got into the library, and there I rummaged, for it was a charming place, and I was happy as only those are who love books, and feel their influence in the silence of a room whose finest ornaments they are."

"Christie loved books; and the attic next her own was full of them. To this store she found her way by a sort of instinct as sure as that which leads a fly to a honey-pot, and, finding many novels, she read her fill. This amusement lightened many heavy hours, peopled the silent house with troops of friends, and, for a time, was the joy of her life."

"Some stories are so familiar its like going home." 

Note: For 22 previous Celebrity Stamps, look under Labels.

Stamp of an Actor: Judy Garland

"I was born at the age of 12 on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot."

"You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people."

"It's lonely and cold on the top...lonely and cold."

"In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people."

"If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you."

"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else."

"Hollywood is a strange place—if you're in trouble, everybody thinks it's contagious."

"I wanted to believe and I tried my damnedest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and couldn't. So what? Lots of people can't..."   

"On daughter Liza Minnelli: "I think she decided to go into show business when she was an embryo, she kicked so much."

"(MGM) had us working days and nights on end. They`d give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they`d take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills... Then after four hours they`d wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row."

"We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality."


Note: Check out the previous 21 Celebrity Stamps (right) before Judy came along...

Stamp of a Statesman: Jawaharlal Nehru

The following quotes have been excerpted from Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (1941), which the first Prime Minister of independent India dedicated to his wife Kamala Nehru. His prose in this book as well as in his other two major works, The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, is mersmerising.

"(Toward Freedom) was written entirely in prison, except for the postscript and certain minor changes, from June 1934 to February 1935. The primary object in writing these pages was to occupy myself with a definite task, so necessary in the long solitudes of jail life, as well as to review past events in India with which I had been connected to enable myself to think clearly about them. I began the task in a mood of self-questioning and, to a large extent, this persisted throughout. I was not writing deliberately for an audience, but, if I thought of an audience, it was one of my own countrymen and countrywomen. For foreign readers I would probably have written differently, or with a different emphasis..."

"Letter writing and receiving in jail were always serious incursions on a peaceful and unruffled existence. They produced an emotional state which was disturbing; for a day or two afterward one's mind wandered, and it was difficult to concentrate on the day's work."

"My main occupation (in jail), however, was reading and writing. I could not have all the books I wanted, as there were restrictions and a censorship, and the censors were not always very competent for the job. Spengler's Decline of the West was held up because the title looked dangerous and seditious. But I must not complain, for I had, on the whole, a goodly variety of books." 

"The only books that British officials heartily recommended were religious books or novels. It is wonderful how dear to the heart of the British Government is the subject of religion and how impartially it encourages all brands of it."

"I was well up in children's and boys' literature; the Lewis Carroll books were great favorites, and The Jungle Books and Kim. I was fascinated by Gustave Dore's illustrations to Don Quixote, and Fridtjof Nansen's Farthest North opened out a new realm of adventure to me. I remember reading many of the novels of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, H.G. Wells's romances, Mark Twain, and the Sherlock Holmes stories. I was thrilled by The Prisoner of Zenda, and Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat was for me the last word in humor. Another book stands out still in my memory; it was Du Maurier's Trilby; also Peter Ibbetson. I also developed a liking for poetry, a liking which has to some extent endured and survived the many other changes to which I have been subject."

"It is a little absurd to discuss this question of freedom of mind in prison in India when, as it happens, the vast majority of the prisoners are not allowed any newspapers or writing materials. It is not a question of censorship but of total denial." 

"In Lucknow Jail I used to sit reading almost without moving for considerable periods, and a squirrel would climb up my leg and sit on my knee and have a look round. And then it would look into my eyes and realize that I was not a tree or whatever it had taken me for. Fear would disable it for a moment, and then it would scamper away."

"Reading was my principal occupation during those winter days and long evenings. Almost always, whenever the superintendent visited us, he found me reading. This devotion to reading seemed to get on his nerves a little, and he remarked on it once, adding that, so far as he was concerned, he had practically finished his general reading at the age of twelve!"

"Sometimes I would weary of too much reading, and then I would take to writing. My historical series of letters to my daughter kept me occupied right through my two-year term, and they helped rne very greatly to keep mentally fit."

"From sunset to sunrise (more or less) we were locked up in our cells, and the long winter evenings were not very easy to pass. I grew tired of reading or writing hour after hour, and would start walking up and down that little cell four or five short steps forward and then back again. I remembered the bears at the zoo tramping up and down their cages. Sometimes when I felt particularly bored I took to my favorite remedy, the shirshasana (a yogic exercise) standing on the head!"

"Travel books were always welcome records of old travelers, Hiuen Tsang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and others, or moderns like Sven Hedin, with his journeys across the deserts of Central Asia, and Roerich, finding strange adventures in Tibet. Picture books also, especially of mountains and glaciers and deserts, for in prison one hungers for wide spaces and seas and mountains. I had some beautiful picture books of Mont Blanc, the Alps, and the Himalayas, and I turned to them often to gaze at the glaciers when the temperature of my cell or barrack was 115 F or even more. An atlas was an exciting affair. It brought all manner of past memories and dreams of places we had visited and places we had wanted to go to." 

"One extravagance which I have kept up will be hard to give up, and this is the buying of books."

For previous Celebrity Stamps, see under Labels to your right.

Stamp of a Writer: Maxim Gorky

"Why, (reading books) is the only pleasure I have. While I'm reading it is as if I were living in another city, and when I have come to the end, as if I were falling from the belfry."

"The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'."

"Many contemporary authors drink more than they write."

"I caught a chill while I was tipsy. I had typhoid fever. When I began to get well—it was torture ! I lay quite alone all day and all night, and it seemed to me as if I were dumb and blind, thrown into a pit like a pup. Thanks to the doctor, he gave me books all the time, or else I'd have died of depression... I kept reading poetry... I read, and it was as sweet as if I were swallowing milk. There is, brother, such poetry, that when you read it, it's like your sweetheart kissing you. And sometimes a verse will give you such a blow on the heart: you blaze up as if it had struck a spark."
— From Three of Them

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.”
— From Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918

"You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better."

"Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself."

Note: For the 19 previous Celebrity Stamps, click here.

Leo Tolstoy and Maxmim Gorky

Anton Chekhov with Maxim Gorky

Stamp of a Director: Alfred Hitchcock

On Films and Filmmaking
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

"To me Psycho (1960) was a big comedy. Had to be."

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

"Our original title, you know, was 'The Man in Lincoln`s Nose'. Couldn't use it, though. They also wouldn't let us shoot people on Mount Rushmore. Can`t deface a national monument. And it`s a pity, too, because I had a wonderful shot in mind of Cary Grant hiding in Lincon`s nose and having a sneezing fit." — On 'North by Northwest', 1959

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."

"To make a great film you need three things—the script, the script and the script."

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."

"Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"Self-plagiarism is style."

"Cary Grant is the only actor I ever loved in my whole life."

"There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating."

On Murder
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homely places like the kitchen table."

"Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal."

"In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man."

"One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life."

On Fear
"The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them."

"I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline-production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one."

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

"I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes... have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it."
— On his lifelong fear of eggs.

"Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film."

On Television
"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up every time."

"Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

"Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs."

On Books
"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book—it makes a very poor doorstop."

Note: You'll find 18 other Celebrity Stamps under Labels. On October 31, 2011, I wrote a short piece on Hitchcockian humour that includes some of the quotes reproduced above. You can read it here.

Stamp of a Statesman: Abraham Lincoln

"The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read."

"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how — the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all."

"Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing "Oh my offense is rank" surpasses that commencing, "To be or not to be." But pardon this small attempt at criticism."

"'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

"Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space." 

"...when I came of age I did not know much — Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three, but that was all — I have not been to school since — The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity...."

"In regard to this great book (the Bible), I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it." [Apparently, Lincoln could quote parts of the Bible, but his favorite book was believed to be Psalms and his favorite poem was Mortality by William Knox.]

"With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."

Stamp of a Singer: Louis Armstrong

"To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!"

"Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?"

"I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."

 
"My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn."

"The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago."

"Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them."

"If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it."

"Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?"

"Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is."

"When I go to the Gate, I'll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we'll play 'Sleepy Time Down South' and 'Hello, Dolly!.' Then he can blow a couple that he's been playing up there all the time."

Previous celebrity stamps featured on this blog: Edgar Allan Poe, Cary Grant, Mark Twain, John Wayne, Virginia Woolf, James Dean, Groucho Marx, Bette Davis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, and Bertrand Russell.

Stamp of a Writer: Edgar Allan Poe

The cost of publishing the work, in a style equal to any of our American publications, will at the extent be $100. This then, of course, must be the limit of any loss supposing not a single copy of the work to be sold. It is more than probable that the work will be profitable and that I may gain instead of lose, even in a pecuniary way.

— To John Allan, his foster father, May 29, 1829

At the request of Mr. T.W. White, I take the liberty of addressing you and of soliciting some little contribution to our Southern Literary Messenger. I am aware that you are continually pestered with such applications, and am ready to believe that I have very little chance of success in this attempt to engage you in our interest, yet I owe it to the magazine to make the effort.

— To James Fenimore Cooper, June 7, 1836

Could I obtain the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift — any thing, by sea or land — to relieve me from the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I now, with a breaking heart, submit, and for which neither my temper nor my abilities have fitted me, I would never again repine at any dispensation of God. I feel that I could then, (having something beyond mere literature as a profession) quickly elevate myself to the station in society which is my due. It is needless to say how fervent, how unbounded would be my gratitude to the one who should thus rescue me from ruin, and put me in possession of happiness. I leave my fate in your hands.

— To James Paulding, American writer and US Secretary of the Navy, July 19, 1838.

I feel, however, that I am, in regard to yourself an utter stranger — and that I have no claim whatever upon your good offices. Yet I could not feel that I had done all which could be justly done, towards ensuring success, until I had made this request of you. I have a strong hope that you will be inclined to grant it, for you will reflect that what will be an act of little moment in respect to yourself — will be life itself to me.

My request now, therefore, is that, if you approve of William Wilson, you will express so much in your own terms in a letter to myself and permit Mess: Lea & Blanchard to publish it, as I mentioned.

— To Washington Irving, October 12, 1839 

I wish to publish a new collection of my prose tales with some such title as this — “The Prose Tales of Edgar A. Poe including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the “Descent into The Maelstrom”, and all later pieces, with a second edition of the “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”.

The “later pieces” will be eight in number, making the entire collection thirty-three — which would occupy two thick novel volumes.

I am anxious that your firm should continue to be my publishers, and, if you would be willing to bring out the book, I should be glad to accept the terms which you allowed me before — that is — you receive all profits, and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends.

— To Lea and Blanchard, August 13, 1841

I need not call your attention to the signs of the times in respect to magazine literature. You will admit that the tendency of the age lies in this way — so far at least as regards the lighter lepers. The brief, the terse, the condensed, and the easily circulated will take place of the diffuse, the ponderous, and the inaccessible. Even our reviews (lucus a non lucendo) are found too massive for the taste of the day: I do not mean for the taste of the tasteless, but for that of the few. In the meantime the finest minds of Europe are beginning to lend their spirit to magazines. 

— To H.W. Longfellow, June 22, 1841

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life.

— To Frederick W. Thomas, an old friend, February 14, 1849 

Material Source: © The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

First Day Cover: © Postal History Store

Stamp of an Actor: Cary Grant

"Insanity runs in my family, it practically gallops."

"We have our factory, which is called a stage. We make a product, we color it, we title it and we ship it out in cans."

"I'd like to have made one of those big splashy Technicolor musicals with Rita Hayworth."

"I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else."

"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

"My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can."

"Hollywood is very much like a streetcar. Once a new star is made and comes aboard, an old is edged out of the rear exit. There's room for only so many and no more."

"I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each." Cary Grant was born Archibald Alexander Leach.

Stamp of a Writer: Samuel L. Clemens (MARK TWAIN)

"I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55."

"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

"I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience."

"We write frankly and fearlessly but then we "modify" before we print."

"You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by."

"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it."

"If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them — you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea."

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice." 

"An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency."

"There is only one brief, solitary law for letter-writing, and yet you either do not know that law, or else you are so stupid that you never think of it. It is very easy and simple: Write only about things and people your correspondent takes a living interest in."

"Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder, and writing them up with aggravated circumstantiality."

"Classic — a book which people praise and don't read."

Stamp of an Actor: John Wayne

"A man's got to do what a man's got to do."

"I don't want ever to appear in a film that would embarrass a viewer. A man can take his wife, mother, and his daughter to one of my movies and never be ashamed or embarrassed for going."

"Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway."

"I've had three wives, six children and six grandchildren and I still don't understand women."

"Talk low, Talk slow, and don't say too much."

"I don't think John Ford had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River (1948) for Howard Hawks. I was never quite sure what he did think of me as an actor. I know now, though. Because when I finally won an Oscar for my role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969), Ford shook my hand and said the award was long overdue me as far as he was concerned. Right then, I knew he'd respected me as an actor since Stagecoach (1939), even though he hadn't let me know it. He later told me his praise earlier, might have gone to my head and made me conceited, and that was why he'd never said anything to me, until the right time."

"Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business."

"I have tried to live my life so that my family would love me and my friends respect me. The others can do whatever the hell they please."

That Redford (Robert Redford) fellow is good. Brando (Marlon Brando). Ah, Patton (1970), George C. Scott. But the best of the bunch is Garner, James Garner. He can play anything. Comedy westerns, drama, you name it. Yeah, I have to say Garner is the best around today. He doesn't have to say anything—just make a face and you crack up."

"Well, you like...each picture for...a different reason. But I think my favourite will always be the next one."

"I said there was a tall, lanky kid that led 150 airplanes across Berlin. He was an actor, but that day, I said, he was a colonel. Colonel Jimmy Stewart (James Stewart). So I said, "What is all this crap about Reagan (Ronald Reagan) being an actor?" "Young fella, if you're lookin' for trouble I'll accommodate ya."

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."

"God-damn, I'm the stuff men are made of!"