I Want to Write

About ordinary things

The door is a crossing, a junction marking the divide between the realm of the public and the private, between the chaos of the unformed world outside and the sacrosanct order within and, as such, it is a symbolic moment which needs to be marked.

Edwin Heathcote, Making an entrance

About relationships

In the best comic books and graphic novels, movement is the deferred magic that gives the pages their dormant power and dynamism. In the greatest cinema, stillness is the magic to which motion nostalgically, primally aspires to return. That is why the relationship between the two forms, though it may never be a marriage, will always be alive, mysterious and passionate as a romance.

Nigel AndrewsThe relationship between cinema and comics

With passion

Like everything that you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You’re television incarnate… indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death… are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness… virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you.

Max, the old guard News Division editor, to Diana, the nubile young television programming executive, when breaking up with her in the film Network (1976)

The truth

The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business. It has been since man crawled out of slime. And our children will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilised, all boredom amused.

Arthur explains the new world to Howard in the film Network (1976)

The damm ugly truth

We’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever gonna find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusions. None of it is true!

But you people sit there day after day, night after night. All ages, colours, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, eat like the tube, raise your children like the tube, even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off right now.

Howard explaining the television business to his audience in the film Network (1976)

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