Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

CHARLIE: That's what marriage is, Arnold. It's a job. You work at it. You work at it twenty-four hours a day. It's your job to make that person feel happy. You have to sit and think, "How am I going to make that person feel happy?" It's your job to make that other person happy. And, if your girl is halfway decent, she's going to make it her job to make you happy. Then you get to feel, I can depend on this person. And that's love, man. That's the greatest thing in the world. There's nothing like it. Arnold, I don't know how to explain this to you . . . but that's what my wife does for me. She's the one that makes life worth living.

It is my current belief that the function of the writer is to give the audience some shred of meaning to the otherwise meaningless pattern of their lives. Our lives are filled with endless moments of stimulus and depression. We relate to each other in an incredibly complicated manner. Every fiber of relationship is worth a dramatic study. There is far more exciting drama in the reasons why a man gets married than in why he murders someone. The man who is unhappy in his job, the wife who thinks of a lover, the girl who wants to get into television, your father, mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends - all these are better subjects for drama than Iago. What makes a man ambitious? Why does one girl always try to steal her kid sister's boy friends? Why does your uncle attend his annual class reunion faithfully every year? Why do you always find it depressing to visit your father? These are the substances of good television drama; and the deeper you probe into and examine the twisted semiformed complexes of emotional entanglements, the more exciting your writing becomes.

You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

The writer [i.e. at rehearsals] should stay away from the actors except to let them know how much he is delighted by them. Actors, like everyone else in show business, need this constant reward. Don't flatter an actor unless he deserves it, but most professional actors, if they are responsive, will give you frequent cause for praise. Other than this, don't meddle with them. Actors will always come up to the writer, if he is around at rehearsals, and try to talk their parts out with him. The writer must refer them to the director. The director has his own idea of how to approach each actor, and advice from the writer will just confuse the actor and diffuse the director's authority.

I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!

OLD LADY: I'm sixty-six years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. SON-IN-LAW: Missus Fanning . . . OLD LADY; An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what? [She is beginning to cry now] Is this what it all comes to?

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.

Most movies, even the good ones, are based upon the extraordinary incident and the exceptional character. In writing the stage play, it is necessary to contrive exciting moments of theater. Marty and The Mother are bundled together in one discussion because each represents in its own way the sort of material that does best on television. They both deal with the world of the mundane, the ordinary, and the untheatrical. The main characters are typical, rather than exceptional; the situations are easily identifiable by the audience; and the relationships are as common as people. The essence of these two shows lies in their literal reality. I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wire-tapped. I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life.

MR HEALY: Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What's wrong with labor? A man's work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We've gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it's sure we're losing the very juice of living.
BOY: The world changes, Mister Healy. The old things go, and each of us must make peace with the new.

There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle.

When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?...I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?...And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death.

Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?"

Marty was a comment on the social values of our times.