Joe Eszterhas Quotes

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

Now on a personal level with things like the California Tax Commission… I really think if people started banding together and saying no to this it could snowball and that could really help.

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

I began my addiction when I was 12 years old. By the time 40, 45 years later, when it, you know, it threatened my life and maimed me in terms of my voice, I was so addicted that I was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.

There are no crowds out there demanding to see smoking scenes in movies.

I just wanted to make sure that what I write is what appears on screen, to not have some idiot change it on its way to the screen.

Politics has become entertainment.

The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not.

I have my own religious bond with the God in my own head.

I have only one loyalty – to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer.

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock’n’roll, politics as a movie.

They do the same thing [with cigarette] that they do in the kind of action picture where you know 200 people are killed and then there’s no pain.

I have always been fascinated by the corruption of power.

The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.

Let’s make Joe Lieberman accountable for his rhetoric. Not a penny more until he ‘clarifies’ his position to the satisfaction of our creative freedom.

Anyone I think who – that would go through a cancer ward and would see the result of what smoking does, would never, ever think of smoking is sexy again.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives – they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.