Farber Quotes

In life, you have a choice to be better or bitter. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Every time I go back to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to wait for my test results, and I wonder if I've relapsed or if I'm doing okay, I don't think about my company. I'm proud of everything we've done, but at the end of the day, it comes back to family. I'm still a wife, a mom, a sister - all of those things. ~ Kathy Giusti

Frank Capra, Hollywood's Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the 'Saturday Evening Post' covers of Norman Rockwell. 'It's A Wonderful Life,' the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch. ~ Manny Farber

There's no reward in life without risk. ~ Barry Farber

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it. ~ Barry Farber

The story of Warner Brothers' movie, 'Mildred Pierce,' recounts the enormous and unrewarded sacrifices that a mother (Joan Crawford) makes for her spoiled, greedy daughter (Ann Blythe). ~ Manny Farber

I didn't really get into underground comics, though I've liked some of what I've seen. Dame Darcy was very impressive to meet, really talented. In general, I've always been more interested in searching out music, so I think I miss out on a lot of underground art. ~ Neil Farber

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless. ~ William Gibson

The Winnipeg Art Gallery has a good collection of Inuit art, and most of what I've seen I've seen there or in the few books I have. I should spend more time researching. ~ Neil Farber

When I was 18, I was moving to New York to start college at The New School. I had done a year of college in Toronto and wasn't happy there. I didn't have any friends in New York City, but I applied and got in. It was pretty overwhelming, but everyone in New York is so ambitious and creative. ~ Stacey Farber

To me, art and music inform each other continually, and when I was making more music there was an overall aesthetic that was shared by both mediums. Now I always listen to music when I work, so when I am working a lot, that is when I start searching out new music and finding new things to get excited about. ~ Neil Farber

We all have to die some day, if we live long enough. ~ David J. Farber

The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think it's cool to be smart, and I think it's sexy to be smart. ~ Stacey Farber

Turned into a horrific mistake. Lucy Willis had observed that folic acid, if administered to nutrient-deprived patients, could restore the normal genesis of blood. Farber wondered whether administering folic acid to children with leukemia might also restore normalcy to their blood. Following that tenuous trail, he obtained some synthetic folic acid, recruited a cohort of leukemic children, and started injecting folic acid into them. In the months that passed, Farber found that folic acid, far from stopping the progression of leukemia, actually accelerated it. In one patient, the white cell count nearly doubled. In another, the leukemia cells exploded into the bloodstream and sent fingerlings of malignant cells to infiltrate the skin. Farber stopped the experiment in a hurry. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

...so much has been laid on the sunset - heavy-handed metaphors, sentimental music. Everyone's always walking into them, and that is some very intense light. Maybe that's where the term "love is blind" comes from, because so many people are walking into sunsets, burning out their corneas. ~ Kirk Farber

Taboos are always going to be interesting.Our [ with Michael Dumontier] style has its range and there is room for explicitness in violence, but not at the expense of our classy, highbrow image. ~ Neil Farber

I don't teach. I don't think I could. I also don't really do anything else artistically, locally. ~ Neil Farber

'The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime. ~ Manny Farber

I remember there were days when - and this is kind of gross - I would sleep in my uniform to save time in the morning and then get up and go to school ... it didn't matter because I didn't have to impress anyone, and I didn't have to look cute in class. ~ Stacey Farber

A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. ~ Manny Farber

I love Inuit art, and most anything you would find in a folk art museum, as well as children's art or children's book illustrators or illustrators in general - all the kinds of work that my paintings would draw comparisons to. ~ Neil Farber

The new Disney cartoon 'Bambi' is interesting because it's the first one that's been entirely unpleasant. ~ Manny Farber

'From Here to Eternity' happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is mistaken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course. ~ Manny Farber

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art. ~ Neil Farber

Actually, what will be shown from here to eternity will be Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr cavorting on the beach. 'From Here to Eternity' must have seemed like a chore to its director, Fred Zinnemann. ~ Manny Farber

Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect. ~ Manny Farber

Before seeing 'The Pride of the Yankees,' you may or may not know that the Yankees referred to are the ones who win the World Series each year. After seeing it you will find that the reference is indirect. ~ Manny Farber

I have a great love of the actual. ~ Manny Farber

Service learning is all about the process: it builds in reflection, takes weeks or months, and culminates in a community celebration. ~ Katy Farber

'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties. ~ Manny Farber

I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar. ~ Manny Farber

Orson Welles's second 'I-did-it' should show once and for all that film making, radio and the stage are three different guys better kept separated. 'The Magnificent Ambersons' is one of those versions of the richest family in town during the good old days. ~ Manny Farber

One of the fine moments in 1940s film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign. ~ Manny Farber

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him. ~ Greil Marcus

We are not perfect. None of us is. I apologize for that flaw. I thank the governor for giving me a job with a driver. ~ Zulima Farber

This is a source of much embarrassment and puzzlement to me about myself. (It) probably requires psychoanalysis of why there is this aberration in my life. The rest of my conduct, I think you will agree, is not reflective of my driving record, and I apologized for it. ~ Zulima Farber

I grew up on a farm with only two TV channels. I didn't grow up around much culture. When I got excited about painting, I never really got further than what would have been in a modern art history textbook. ~ Neil Farber