Lackin Quotes

“Although Ethan Hawke liked River Phoenix, he thought his defining quality was “naïve pretentiousness.” Hawke said, “To me, education helps you see that your weirdness is not unique. I doubt, though, that River, at age fourteen, had read a book. He thought his ideas on life and the environment were original. Because he’d never been to school, he had no social skills, and lacked a sense of what was appropriate conversation. And he had this peculiar way of anecdotalizing his past, living his life in the third person. You had the sense he was making his own mythology. I suppose we all do that, but River went to the extreme.”
― Gavin Edwards, Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind

“Arsenio found himself trusting his heart more than once during the brief but intense Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991.

ARSENIO HALL: "I was going to do a joke about what Saddam Hussein would say to his wife on the morning of January fifteenth, 1991 [the start of the campaign]. When he was going to work I wondered out loud if he would say, ‘Honey, don’t wait up!' "

On Monday he decided not to use the gag. Then on Tuesday, when the staff talked about it, he mulled over the idea again.

ARSENIO HALL: “I put a little extra thought into it. Much as I wanted to try to make people laugh in a world that was not always funny, I knew I was doing a joke about war, and that the potential result of war is loss of life — so I’m real, real careful.”

Then that night on the show, his guest, Farrah Fawcett, told him that she thought if women ran the world, there wouldn’t be any wars.
Eventually, ”I chickened out on [the joke],“ Arsenio said. ”As much as I believe our country should function from a position of strength, what’s going on now is not worth bloodshed. I place a lot of value on life.”
― Norman King, Arsenio Hall