Tom Brokaw Quotes

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

Everyone thinks of the roaring twenties and associates it with decadence and flappers, female sexual liberation, the freedom of women to express themselves, the beginning of feminism. But it was also a time of huge, huge change.

The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.

The '20s are a very interesting period to me.

There are always decades that interest people. For me, that's the Roaring Twenties.

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.

The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.

If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.

There is no way I'd have wanted to live in the Twenties. It was really crap for women.

It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'

The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest.

'Boardwalk' begins literally on the first day of Prohibition, which I think was a wonderful way to start - to have the story kind of come out of this massive historical phenomenon. And the more I researched the '20s, the more I discovered just how interesting it was.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in 'Lawless.' John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality.

Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

The Twenties have this sort of attitude where you never know what's around the corner.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

The world of the flapper - live free, wild and young - that energy is intoxicating. It's nice to inject that into the more controlled 'Downton' way of living.

I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s.

Bootleggers were romanticized by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Gatsby is a bootlegger. And they were not thought of as evil criminals in the newspapers, either. There was a certain amount of affection for them.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties - with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby,' and the pre-Code films - as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.

Like the rest of the planet, I'm absolutely dying to see Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby' and am thrilled that Leonardo DiCaprio was cast in it - he's perfect.

The first paid gig? It was back home in Terre Haute, Indiana, back in 1925, '26, when I was going to high school and working in a speakeasy.