The Pat Hobby Stories - Quotations

Quotations

• Pat was forty-nine. He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the 'originals' he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much. But the good old silent days you got somebody's plot and a smart secretary and gulped benzedrine 'structure' at her six or eight hours every week. The director took care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work. (From "A Man in the Way".)

• ...for an old-timer like Pat, what people you sat with at lunch was more important in getting along than what you dictated in your office. This was no art, as he often said - this was an industry. (From "'Boil Some Water - Lots of It'".)

• 'Mr. Marcus,' he said so sincerely that his voice trembled, 'I wouldn't be surprised if Orson Welles is the biggest menace that's come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand a picture and I wouldn't be surprised if he was so radical that you had to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.' (From "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles".)

• Most writers look like writers whether they want to or not. It is hard to say why - for they model their exteriors whimsically on Wall Street brokers, cattle kings or English explorers - but they all turn out looking like writers, as definitely typed as 'The Public' or 'The Profiteers' in the cartoons. (From "Pat Hobby, Putative Father".)

• Pat was at 'the end of his resources' - though this term is too ominous to describe a fairly usual condition in his life. He was an old timer in pictures; he had once known sumptuous living, but for the past ten years jobs had been hard to hold - harder to hold than glasses. (From "No Harm Trying".)