Commonplace Book: The Vortex Report

Underneath the tinsel and fabric is real tinsel and fabric.
   -- Davy Jones

They were rolling in wealth, sir. You've no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories -- the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
   -- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Chandler or Hammett or one of those guys said the point of a plot in a detective movie is to get your hero to the next girl to flirt with. When's the next girl or funny bit going to happen. North by Northwest? Tell me again how he gets to the middle of the field with a plane after him? I can't. How does he get to Mount Rushmore? I don't know, but it's great.
   -- Paul Thomas Anderson, on adapting Inherent Vice for film

These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it's too unstructured. But somehow we'll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we're too hip for that, and yet there's no final proof that some of it isn't true ...
   -- Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

History becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction.
   -- Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

It is a myth, not a mandate -- a fable, not a logic -- by which people are moved.
      -- Irwin Edman

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
   -- John F. Kennedy

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made-up truths.
   -- Marion Barry

You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to report it.
-- Larry Speakes, Press Secretary for George Bush, 1982

If we maintain our faith in God, our love of freedom, and superior global air power, I think we can look to the future with confidence.
   -- General Curtis LeMay

I keep thinking: now that every single human being on Earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember how you used to see those pictures? Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all B.S., or my theory is that the Martians have decided, "Don't go down there, man. All those fuckers have cameras now."
   -- George Clooney

From their earliest years, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of children's everyday lives, and it is through fantasy that they achieve carthasis.
   -- Jonathan Cott, in a 1976 Rolling Stone profile of Maurice Sendak

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.
   -- Miles Beresford Kington