Richard Elman Quotes

If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

So something about that touched me, obviously, when I was young and it just stayed with me. I'm always amazed by that, because my experience seems to be so much different than what I'm told, so much of the time.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.

I remember seeing this picture my mother had of Dick Clark. It didn't inspire me to be an actor or anything, but when I did 'American Dreams' with Dick Clark, my mother came out, and she showed him this picture of them that was taken 35 years earlier. It was great.

I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.

I remember, as a child, loving it when my mom laughed, but I was definitely not a class clown.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

You know this old style of American family series? Well, I sit there and cry.

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album.

I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'

I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.

When I'm singing, it's a mixture of my innocence in the projects, my mom and dad. It's all the good and the bad, the laughs and the frowns that I went through and seen other people go through. Then you be trying to write it. Whatever's coming out, you try and make it all cool.

It's funny because growing up, when Ali G first burst off the screen, it was something that I was probably too young to be watching, but I absolutely loved it.

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

The Christmas after Mom & Dad split up, they both went crazy buying us presents. Matt, Jonny, and I were showered with gifts at home and at Dads apartment. I thought that was great. I was all in favor of my love being paid for with presents. This year all I got was a diary and a secondhand watch. Okay, I know this is corny, but this really is what Christmas is all about.

I always wanted my mother to be Queen for a Day. I always used to watch that show that came on television.

You know, I might miss some of your witticisms when you’re gone, but one thing I won’t miss? Your overwhelming sense of melodrama and despair. It’s too much even for me.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library. She pointed to the shelf opposite. Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.