मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, October 13, 2025

Joseph L Mankiewicz's All About Eve@75...Entertainment, Egos and Errection

Sam Staggs writes in his book  'All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!', 2000:

 

"...Celeste Holm, in her apartment on Central Park West, answered the phone herself. After hearing a description of the book in progress, titled All About All About Eve, she asked, “Why the hell do you want to write that book?”

“Why? Because millions of people love the movie. And also because no one has told the story of how it came about and why All About Eve is considered both a Hollywood classic and a cult film.”

“I don’t get it,” she snapped. “A work of art speaks for itself! I think a book like that is a waste of time. If people are interested, let them see the movie.”

“I’ve seen it thirty times.”

“Then see it thirty more!”

“Look, Miss Holm, it’s not backstairs gossip I’m after. But since Mankiewicz lost all his papers in the fire—”

“I guess you want to talk to me about Bette Davis?” Celeste Holm demanded, and without waiting for an answer she continued. “I’ve talked to everybody in the world about that movie!”

“Bette Davis? No. I’d rather hear about you.”

“All this crap about books—I don’t get it.”

“Suppose I send you a detailed letter about the book. Your memories of shooting All About Eve are important.”

“Well … maybe. I don’t know. Good-bye.”

She never answered the letter...."

 

courtesy: Alejandro Mogollo Art

from left: Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Thelma Ritter

So much acting talent, doing substantive roles, has seldom come together before and after on silver screen.

Robert Gore-Langton writes in the Spectator, UK on January 26 2019:

"...In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp (her third husband), and her career was spiralling above the plughole. She only got the lead part in All About Eve when Claudette Colbert — who was all signed up — ruptured a disc while doing a rape scene on another film. The story goes that with Colbert shrieking in traction, the producer Darryl Zanuck, who hadn’t spoken to Davis since using the words ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, was obliged to offer her the part. It didn’t take much. No sane actress could resist Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fabulous script with its sophisticated wit and refreshing cynicism. Davis literally kissed the script and leapt at the part of the Broadway diva Margo Channing. It did her libido a power of good. She had a thing about men with hairy backs and immediately had an affair with her on-screen partner, the hirsute Gary Merrill, who later said he spent three days walking around the set trying to hide a permanent erection...."

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