Frederic Raphael Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

He decided to make it [Daisy Miller] exactly as it stood; he crammed James's words into Cybill's mouth like fish into a letterbox.
On Peter Bogdanovich

Frederic Raphael
Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.

Frederic Raphael
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.

Frederic Raphael
Who now reads novels as a guide to life and love? Everyone wants to star in his or her own movie.

Frederic Raphael
Kubrick wasn't making a movie when I was working with him. He was preparing to make a movie, which is something quite different. Part of the charm of working with a director like Kubrick, if there is or was a director like him, was that during the privileged period before he even showed (the script) to the studio, it was just between him and me. You are sort of creating a game in the ball court of theory. There is no film being shot; there is no budget. It was in many ways a very exciting time. It's also very fraught, particularly for a writer, because you don't know if it's going to be of any point.

Frederic Raphael
I come from suburbia…and I don't ever want to go back. It's the one place in the world that's further away than anywhere else.

Frederic Raphael
Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.

Frederic Raphael
'So this is the city of dreaming spires,' Sheila said. 'Theoretically speaking that's Oxford,' Adam said. 'This is the city of perspiring dreams.'
Of Cambridge

Frederic Raphael
He glanced with disdain at the big centre table where the famous faces of the Cambridge theatre were eating a loud meal. 'So this is the city of dreaming spires,' Sheila said. 'Theoretically speaking that's Oxford,' Adam said. 'This is the city of perspiring dreams.'

Frederic Raphael
The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?

Frederic Raphael
One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.

Frederic Raphael
Although he was an intelligent man, I don't think that he was a supreme intelligence. He had a sense of having missed a university education. He was working when he was 17. It may have been his choice because his father was not a poor man. I would not, to say the least, call him a frank man. He talked about a great many things and then would occasionally reveal little anecdotal aspects of his own life. He was not interested in our becoming buddies. He was avid for knowledge, which he hoped I possessed, and which I tried to give the impression I did. I don't have any notion whatever of being omniscient.

Frederic Raphael