Joseph L. Mankiewicz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“There is no such thing as realistic dialogue. If you [simply recorded] the real conversation of any people and played it back from the stage, it would be impossible to listen to. It would be redundant . . . . The good dialogue writer is the one who can give you the impression of real speech.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“Please don't look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“And Kate Hepburn-God, she's beautiful, God, she plays golf well, God, she can get anyone in the world on the phone, God, she knows what to do all the time, God, she wears clothes well.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made a mistake, I blushed furiously, and when nervous, as I was in the company of girls, I perspired freely.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“I'm not biting my fingernails. I'm biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz -
“I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk. Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard.”
-- Joseph L. Mankiewicz
