Buster Keaton Quotes

Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.

I used to think that looking across a pillow into the fabulous face of Buster Keaton would be a more thrilling destiny than any screen career.

I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind

Laughter is the stubborn reward of grim times.

Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.

Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons.

I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do. Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers.

NOTICIARIO DE UN COLEGIAL MELANCÓLICO NOMINATIVO: la nieve GENITIVO: de la nieve DATIVO: a o para la nieve ACUSATIVO: a la nieve VOCATIVO: ¡oh la nieve! ABLATIVO: con la nieve de la nieve en la nieve por la nieve sin la nieve sobre la nieve tras la nieve La luna tras la nieve Y estos pronombres personales extraviados por el río y esta conjugación tristísima perdida entre los árboles BUSTER KEATON

It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems infinitely elastic, an unruly instument to be wilded with a cheeky kind of grace.

I was standing on the deck looking down at a gang of stevedores working on the dock thirty feet below. One of them recognized me, nudged his neighbor, and pointed. All at once the whole gang stopped working to yell, 'Booster! Booster Keaton!' They waved in wild excitement, and I waved back, marveling, because it was fifteen years of more since they could have seen my last M-G-M picture. And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it. Dr. Avedon said I could live to be a hundred years old. I intend to do it. For who would not wish to live a hundred years in a world where there are so many people who remember with gratitude and affection a little man with a frozen face who made them laugh a bit long years ago when they and I were both young?

Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?

In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless. He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that his father was dead, Joe felt only regret. It was not just the usual regret over things left unsaid, thanks unexpressed and apologies withheld. Joe did not yet regret the lost future opportunities for expatiation on favorite shared subjects, such as film directors (they revered Buster Keaton) or breeds of dogs.

My God, we ate, slept and dreamed our pictures.

The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.

Our lawyer beat them in court by pointing out that the law barred children only from performing on a high or low wire, a trapeze, bicycle, and the like. There was not one word that made it illegal for my father to display me on the stage as a human mop or to kick me in the face.

I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

(This was something of a surprise given Peg’s own physiognomy, which might be tactfully described as “plain.”)

He was an atrociously terrible businessman, an indifferent celebrity, and, until late in his life, a dilatory husband and father at best.

the flickering shapes that the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, on first observing the Cinématographe at work, had described as “vague but sinister” dispatches from “the Kingdom of Shadows.

Nearly everywhere you look in early film criticism, the medium is characterized above all by its speed.

In such films, he laments, “people are but types, swiftly moved chessmen.

It is evident that so far-reaching and commanding an institution among the masses may work irreparable evil or boundless good.

It was in New York in late March 1917, a few months after Buster and Myra had abandoned Joe in California while he was on a bender, breaking up the Three Keatons’ act for good.

It wouldn’t take long for the same qualities that drew audiences to the Keatons’ act—the irreverence, the potential for danger, and the sheer improvisational lunacy of the small boy’s daredevil stunts—to attract the notice of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Keaton’s modernism—brash in ambition but melancholy in tone—is that of his fellow 1890s babies F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane, who both made spectacular literary debuts in 1920. Like those writers (whom he almost certainly never read), Keaton was formally innovative, inclined to puncture social pretension, and given to making art that was, in a uniquely 1920s way, sardonic and romantic at once.

It’s a relief to the twenty-first-century viewer when this mercifully short sequence comes to an end, but there is also a certain satisfaction in seeing a white man in blackface experience something unusual in the long history of the form: consequences.

It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers—singers and acrobats and musicians—to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.

The survivors of a nuclear war will be able, if they can make their way to Hutchinson, Kansas, and get 200 metres (650 feet) down into the salt-shafts, to retrieve an assortment of objects which have been chosen partly with them in mind. There are seeds of hybrid plants, the files of various commercial enterprises, secret formulae for making brand-name products, food for the treasure-finders, and even folding cots, just in case they bring their babies with them. There is a film library which includes Gone with the Wind, Polly of the Circus, and lots of Buster Keaton.

Cinema’s displacement of theater as the nation’s most popular and influential form of mass entertainment took approximately a generation, a span of time that happened to coincide with Buster Keaton’s first twenty or so years of life.

Right into old age he insisted that all he was out for was a laugh.

The locations’ familiar white-tiled neutrality was like the blank slate of a movie screen, a backdrop against which all sorts of urban encounters might happen.

The notoriously unloquacious Buster only had about three or four standard anecdotes he told over and over in interviews, and the encounter that would follow was one of them.

Claire mimed the salute scene, perfectly mimicking Buster Keaton’s exasperation, launching us into renewed laughter. Jethro snagged my attention, slipping his fingers into mine and bringing my knuckles to his lips for a soft kiss. His smiling eyes ensnared mine, heated and cherishing, making me feel warm and cherished. He looked happy.

Brideless Groom is a good example with the narrative from Seven Chances (the 1925 silent classic directed by and starring Buster Keaton),” he said.

Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars—if we jumped in and did the dirty job?

Indeed, the raid has been mythologized, inspiring several films, most notably in 1926 The General, in which, interestingly, Buster Keaton portrays the conductor, Fuller, as the hero, whereas the Unionists are depicted as ruthless train wreckers, demonstrating the enduring tacit sympathy to the Confederate cause.

Herein lies one of the book’s many virtues: nationalists can’t abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.

I’m no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you’ll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn a cape in a few intimate scenarios, I don’t possess supernatural powers of any kind. Perhaps my IQ is slightly above average, but Mensa isn’t busting down my door. If pressed to define myself, I’d say I’m Horatio Alger between the sheets: a self-made swinging single male. . . with a hefty dose of Buster Keaton mixed in.