Richard Schickel Quotes (10 Quotes)

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

Leone provided that, primarily through stylistic devices. One of the things I like about Leone's Westerns is that he'll spend a very long time on the preliminaries to a gunfight. But then, once they exchange shots, it's very quick, much quicker than the typical walk-down in an American Western. All of that preparation is fabulous. It's kind of funny, and it's very suspenseful.

A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.

You feel like it's not just a guy up there reading copy that people prepared for him to read. That's a good quality and increasingly rare in the television climate of our times. He's something a lot more than just a talking head.

The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack.

Divorced, not loving their abandoned children as much as they loathe their former wives, directing a combination of need and hostility toward the women who drift in and out of their new lives, they are, as one character puts it, involved in a variety of pharmaceutical experiments.