37 Quotes by Buster Keaton

It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One for each Marx brother. You had two of 'em while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear.

Everybody at Metro was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg. They'd laugh their heads off at dialogue written by all your new writers. They were joke-happy. They didn't look for action; they were looking for funny things to say.

You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest.

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out – nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.

I don’t act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.

They say pantomime’s a lost art. It’s never been a lost art and never will be, because it’s too natural to do.

And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven’t heard it.

If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I’ll jump out the window.

Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, “a tragic mask.” On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking “almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful.” I can’t imagine what the great rail splitter’s reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.