Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

1923–1981 United States

Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky (29 January 1923 – 1 August 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both adapted and original screenplays.

United States
Novelists
Playwrights
Screenwriters

Random Paddy Chayefsky quote

22 quotes

You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

Marty (1955)

All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.

Marty (1955)

I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real.

Altered States (1980)

Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

The Hospital (1971)

You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

Marty was a comment on the social values of our times.

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal.

Network (1976)

It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.

The Hospital (1971)

In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!

Network (1976)

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

Network (1976)

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places.

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

Nearby is the boss, a man in his thirties. He is bent over a machine, working on it with a screw driver. The boss is really a pleasant man; he works under the illusion, however, that gruffness is a requisite quality of an executive.

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John.

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose.

The Hospital (1971)

You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month. You prefer lovers to husbands, hotels to homes. You'd rather grieve than live.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?"

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . .

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Paddy Chayefsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.