Michael Joseph

“Roth was a much deeper, more serious man than me in addition to being very funny. Sometimes we’d show up together in some article on Judaism or Jewish humor, but he approached issues from a thoughtful, engaging point of view. I was only interested as far as they gave me good comedy material. He was a thinker, a genuine intellectual.”
― Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing

“I was obsessed with gangsters, baseball players, jazz musicians, and Bob Hope movies, but young women have been a tiny fraction of the women I dated over the decades. I have used the May-December ploy as a comic and romantic theme a few times, just as I have used psychoanalysis or murder or Jewish jokes, but only as good material for plots and laughs.”
― Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing

“External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.”
― Saul Bellow