Clippings

“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.

“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”

“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”