“The artiness of Coppola’s aesthetic ultimately becomes an ethic as Pacino, in somber profile, emerges more victim than villain, more a melancholy Dane than a bloody Macbeth.”
“When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured into my ears — the screams, the metallic clanging, officers’ keys clinking. Some of the women noticed me and smiled warmly or threw up their fists in gestures of solidarity”
“The battle in Kanawha is a cultural revolution, in the strictest sense of the term: an effort by the rural working class to wrest schools — the means of production of their children — away from the permissive technocrats who now control them.”
“Around 10 o’clock Muhammad Ali entered the ring. The audience in the the theatre rose to its feet and cheered. Actually, they said, 'Ali bomaye.' ['Ali, kill him.'] The tribal spirit is very contagious”
“I’m scared,” says a Federal investigator of Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito. “We’ll work our ass off for the next six months to make a case. We’ll work 18 hours a day. But I admit it. I’m afraid of what happens after that. This guy Meade has more power than the Pope.”
“For the past 48 hours, while the President and his family had been once again resisting resignation, his closest aides were conspiring behind his back to force him to resign.”
“Dylan was afraid, that was for sure. But he wasn’t afraid of us, the audience. It was himself he feared — the process or going back over those songs which bore the pain of becoming Bob Dylan, the highs, the lows, all of that life.”