Budd Quotes

I felt Brighton was a perfect ending to a really interesting career. ~ Harold Budd

The Pastor had spent his boyhood in the old country and was not at all sure that hot water, stall showers and the like were necessary to salvation. In fact it was one of his notions that Americans were too clean. Rub all the natural protective oils off their skins, they do for a fact. ~ Budd Schulberg

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

You know what's wrong with our waterfront? It's the love of a lousy buck. It's making the love of a buck, the cushy job, more important than the love of man. It's forgetting that every fellow down here's your brother in Christ. ~ Budd Schulberg

She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser. ~ Anthony Powell

Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in 'Billy Budd,' as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution. ~ Karen DeCrow

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

Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on. ~ Budd Schulberg

It's queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise. ~ Budd Schulberg

Looking back ... it's hard to understand what all the fuss was about as things changed in just a few years. When you look at all the things that have happened in the world, it seems very small. ~ Zola Budd

When you sit in America you miss the open plains and you miss the sound of rain and the smell of rain and the smell of the veld. If you're African it's different and I don't think one will ever become an American or British. It doesn't matter where you move, you will always be a South African, ~ Zola Budd

Zola Budd: so small, so waif-like, you literally can't see her. But there she is ~ Alan Parry

I'm not really a pianist. ~ Harold Budd

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it. ~ Budd Schulberg

In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of 'finished,' whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet. ~ Budd Schulberg

Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them. ~ Budd Schulberg

First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over Monsoon. In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned his right to monopolize conversations or his ability to do it entertainingly. And then there was his colossal lack of perspective. This was one of his most valuable gifts, for perspective doesn't always pay. It can slow you down. ~ Budd Schulberg

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.) ~ David Halberstam

When Kit called me for the next meeting I was either not myself or too much myself. ~ Budd Schulberg

Work hard, and if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud. ~ Budd Schulberg

Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said.
"Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?"
"It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart."
I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. 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 was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind. ~ Budd Schulberg

But that's fine, because I like to have control of the ambience. ~ Harold Budd

Boxing is a mental sport. Think of a prizefight as a chess game of mind and body, and you are a little closer to it than if you compare it to a bloody brawl in an alley. ~ Budd Schulberg

As any opera fan knows, lawyers and judges do not fare well in most operas. Just consider the productions of 'Andrea Chenier,' 'Aida, Norma,' 'Billy Budd,' 'Peter Grimes,' 'The Crucible,' 'Lost in the Stars,' 'The Marriage of Figaro,' 'The Makropulos Case' and Wagner's 'Ring' cycle. Around 1810, the theme of justice emerged in opera. ~ Karen DeCrow

Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture to grow old with dignity and comfort when they haven't got it anymore. ~ Budd Schulberg

I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest. ~ Budd Schulberg

As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes,or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, or who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. ~ Laura Mulvey

There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implied deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldblum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware. ~ Budd Schulberg

You either go along with the system - conform to what is expected to be a hit - or you have very tough going. ~ Budd Schulberg

I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous. ~ Budd Schulberg

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

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

I will never regret not denouncing apartheid. ~ Zola Budd

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

Credentials have been a problem for a long time in my work. Originality has been my strength, and credentials and academia have not been. ~ Budd Hopkins

First, my frame of reference for the Britten opera shifted. I'd always thought of Britten's approach in Death in Venice as another exploration of the plight of the individual whose aspirations are at odds with those of the surrounding community: his last opera returning to the themes of Peter Grimes. As I read and listened and thought, however, Billy Budd came to seem a more appropriate foil for Death in Venice. ~ Philip Kitcher

My childhood was absolutely the worst place I've ever been," "It was terrible. ~ Harold Budd

Silence is the sure sign that you're on your way out in Hollywood. ~ Budd Schulberg

For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them "not ready," telling Budd Friedman, "They're funny, but they don't have six minutes." By ~ William Knoedelseder

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. ~ Budd Schulberg

I could have had class. I could have been a contender. ~ Budd Schulberg

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. ~ Budd Schulberg

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

A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it. ~ Budd Hopkins

Isn't everyone a part of everyone else? ~ Budd Schulberg

My paintings and sculptures, at first glance, may appear to be purely aesthetic; closer up, they are not. They hold a feeling of tentativeness, combined with a sense of arrival. ~ Budd Hopkins

I think it's one of the most natural things for any human to do is to be able to run because it's that flight or fight reaction you have. You either fight or you run away. It's just a natural way for us to move, ~ Zola Budd

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

To borrow from Budd Schulberg's description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was "indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch." I no longer have those illusions. Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that "each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last." I was even more delusional. I thought I could skip being devoured entirely. It would never turn on me. I was in control. I was the expert. But I was wrong. ~ Ryan Holiday

Tea-shops were to become my favourite haunts in England. ~ Zola Budd

Hey, you want to hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you. ~ Budd Schulberg

When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges. ~ Terence Stamp

Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rock

If you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy,
maybe you can grasp it. ~ Dick Allen