Robert Warshow > Quotes

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking....History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suitably melancholy to the end.”
― Robert Warshow

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”
― Robert Warshow

“In its initial character, the gangster film is simply one example of the movies' constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indefinitely with a reasonable expectation of profit.”
― Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

“Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.”
― Robert Warshow

“The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club... for the gangster there is only the city, he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.”
― Robert Warshow, Gangster Film Reader

“The gangster is the man of the city,
with the city's language and knowledge,
with its queer and dishonest skills
and its terrible daring,
carrying his life in his hands like a placard,
like a club.”
― Robert Warshow