
“I'd rather have two girls at twenty-one each, than one girl at forty-two.”
You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1940)
Source: Diamonds Are Forever
“I'd rather have two girls at twenty-one each, than one girl at forty-two.”
You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1940)
“Yet still to choose a brat like you,
To haunt a man of forty-two,
Was no great compliment!”
Canto 1
Phantasmagoria (1869)
“Trust me, I'm telling you stories…. I can change the story. I am the story.”
Source: Written on the Body
Osho, And The Flowers Showered (2003), , p. 204
“A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”
Letter to his son Christopher (30 January 1945) — in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), p. 110
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)
(22 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: [On test audiences and alternate endings on DVDs] Seeing these two endings, knowing that the studio most likely chose the one that would close the film after polling test audiences, makes me a little ill. What if I did that with my novels? What would you think of me, if I were to so subvert the act of storytelling and mythmaking in an effort to make more money (by, I might add, perverting democracy)? Okay, at the end of Low Red Moon, I can kill Chance, or I can let her live. Which ending do you prefer? Check the box, and let us know. Should Orpheus make it back to the surface without looking to see if Eurydice is truly following him, or should he look? Should the mouse pull the thorn from the lion's paw, or should he mind his own damned business? I can only hope that it is self-evident that this process is as alien and destructive to art as anything ever could be. Yes, I'm sure it makes people more money, and money is nice, but it has very little to do with telling good and true and useful stories.