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[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.

Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 25
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
John Whitney Stillman
People
Nasty
Unfair
Critics
Jerome
Taken
Salinger
Really
Joan
Way
Cleaners
Think
Attacked
Thinking
David

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Sometimes you don't realize how dependent you are on just a few people, and if they disappear, suddenly you can be thrown on your own resources, which may be limited, and you're really in a fix. So I think that's authentic to the experience that it might be very lonely.
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I call the '70s the golden age of television in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.
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I think crazy people are helpful, crazy people who are the catalysts who make other things happen for everyone else. It's almost as if they're not really making things happen in their own life, but their hyperactivity is triggered for everyone else.
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Mary McCarthy and that Mr. Intellectual kind of guy ... Dwight McDonald? And they were really mean about [Jerome David] Salinger, and oh they were going to destroy him, and just look how thoroughly they destroyed him! No one reads Salinger anymore!
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I love watching the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. I used to have a rule that if Tony Randall's in it, it can't be bad.
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Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe Cosmopolitans has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.
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There's some people who are just very dynamic about social life, and it can be some pretty crazy stuff, but you end up meeting people you like.
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Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'
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The Cha-Cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.
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You can't go by what the governments say or do. It's not the governments. It's on the street where there's more hatred of Americans in Britain than in France.
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I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.
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We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
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Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.
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I would say on the other side of the equation that there were really some massive sales and massive enthusiasm for some films that were given big releases. And I'm not really sure that happens in quite the same way, small films getting big releases. Maybe it still does, I don't know.
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I find it really disturbing to be watching a lot of the medium that I'm trying to work in. I prefer to be doing things that are farther away.
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In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.
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One of the problems of a director on the set is that we become overwhelmed by all the factors and threads of production, that sometimes we can't focus on our main job, which is steering the performances to create the whole film.
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It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.
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That's one of the things I find really bad, is when people not only do injuries to others, but then lie about the others to justify it. It's not bad enough just being bad to someone, but then lying about it.
Whit Stillman