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Preston Sturges [1898-1959] American
Rank: 102
Writer, Playwright


Preston Sturges was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. In 1941, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film The Great McGinty, his first of three nominations in the category.

Architecture

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For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing - some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey - shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.
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According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.
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By the very nature of his art, which depends on invention and innovation, a story teller must depart from the beaten track and, having done so, occasionally startle and disagree with some of his associates. Healthy disagreement we must have.
103
I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature. Architecture
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I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.
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If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?
106
You can't go around the theatres handing out cards saying, 'It isn't my fault'. You go onto the next one.
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I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain.
108
Despite my express wish, I was not left in Chicago, but taken to Paris to live, and I did not see my father for many years. But we never stopped loving each other, and in 1940 he died in my arms in Hollywood, where he had come to be near me at the end.
109
Our gymnasium was remarkable and had more stuff in it than one could dream up in a nightmare. Furthermore, every boy had to use every piece of it during gymnasium class.
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Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.
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Paris Singer had vastly more to do with shaping my character than Mother had; although Mother made innumerable sacrifices for me, and Paris Singer made none. I wanted to be like him.
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Though I believe in God, I don't believe in religion for everybody. Some people who are a little weak and don't want to shoulder any responsibility need Catholicism. For people at the other extreme, there is Christian Science... I think a powerful conscience is worth all the religions put together.
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I always was and always will be optimistic.
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I go through life accumulating possessions... I've always done it... and then, every once in a while, a sort of tidal wave comes along and washes them all away.
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If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.
116
The more you stand in the limelight, the more scarred you will become and the more you will love the limelight.
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How many years and how many pictures does it take to win the confidence of Paramount? How many years before my fellow workers say, 'I know he is doing his best?'
118
I thought for a month or so along the lines of what I call Monsieur Beaucaire in modern clothes. By that, I mean a hero who is believed by all to be a villain but who, in the end, is introduced as a man of great honor with a long list of decorations.
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I am quite sure that a little man who braves ridicule to improve the lot of his fellow men, and is thanked by their jibes, is an interesting character.
120
The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.
121
I compared pooh-poohers of the movies to the myopics who used to holler, 'Get a horse!' when an early automobile exploded by.
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I did not think that a good movie was the equivalent of a good stage play, any more than I thought an automobile ride was as exhilarating as a drive behind a spirited horse, nor a trip by steam as soul-satisfying as a voyage by sail.
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Theater in which you eat is the oldest form of theater.
124
I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.
125
The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.
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The camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at any given moment. To find that spot is absurdly easy: you only have to remember where you were looking at the time the scene was made.
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I never write down to my audiences. I respect honest sentiment and honest pratfalls.
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I have always wondered why the movie industry was so firmly persuaded that the original author could be of no possible help in the case of a remake or any other change in a work.
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I have never done anything but my very best work for anyone, and to do this and retain my first fine enthusiasm over a period of thirty years has required a rather special set of working conditions.
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Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.
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It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.
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The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view.
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In 'Remember the Night,' love reformed her and corrupted him, which gave us the finely balanced moral that one man's meat is another man's poison.
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It is probably a very good thing for a boy to learn to live with enmity, as opposed to an atmosphere of love and affection, as it hardens him and gives him a taste of what he is going to run into later in life.
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Much as I disliked the un-American idea of marrying a lady with a dowry, I must admit that little Mrs. Godfrey's little private income put everything in a faintly different light.
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