Buster Keaton Quotes (12 Quotes)

Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again

We didn't stick to any format. We would just get an idea, and once you started on the idea it would lend itself to gags and natural trouble of any kind. There was no format.

Tragedy is a close-up comedy, a long shot.

When sound came, we found this out--we found this out from our own pictures--that sound didn't bother us at all. There was only one thing I wanted at all times, and insisted on that you go ahead and talk in the most natural way, in your situations. Don't give me puns. Don't give me jokes. No wisecracks.

Everybody at Metro was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg. They'd laugh their heads off at dialogue written by all your new writers. They were joke-happy. They didn't look for action they were looking for funny things to say.

No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.

Life is too serious to do farce comedy.

From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week--that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can't do acrobatics, can't walk a wire, can't juggle--a lot of those things--but there was nothing said in the law that you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week, see.

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One for each Marx brother. You had two of 'em while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear.

I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.