Title: Midnight in Paris
Gil Pender: How was I antisocial?
Inez ?: Oh, please! I mean, you could totally tell you didn't want to go.
Gil Pender: Well, I mean, they're your friends, and I have to admit I'm not quite as taken with them as you are.
Carol ?: What's a nostalgia shop?
Paul ?: Not one of those stores that sells Shirley Temple dolls and old radios? I never know who buys that stuff. Who'd want it?
Inez ?: Well, people who live in the past, people who think their lives would have been happier if they lived in an earlier time.
Paul ?: You know, nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present.
Inez ?: Gil is a complete romantic. I mean, he would be more than happy living in a complete state of perpetual denial.
Carol ?: Really?
Paul ?: And the name for this fallacy is called 'golden age thinking.
Inez ?: Touché.
Paul ?: The erroneous notion that a different time period was better than the one one's living in. It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Inez ?: See, but the problem is, when it comes to his writing, he has absolutely no respect for anybody else's opinion.
Paul ?: Ah, sex and alcohol. It fuels the desire but kills the performance, according to the Bard.
Cole Porter: (Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love)
Let's fall in love
In Spain, the best upper-sets do it
Lithuanians and Letts do it
Let's do it. Let's fall in love.
The Dutch in old Amsterdam do it
Not to mention the Finns
Folks in Siam do it; think of Siamese twins
Some Argentines without means do it
People say in Boston even beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Romantic sponges, they say do it
Oysters down in Oyster Bay do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Cole Porter: (You've Got That Thing)
You got that thing. you got that thing
The thing that makes birds forget to sing
Yes, you've got that thing, that certain thing
You've got that charm, that subtle charm
That makes young farmers desert the farm
Ernest Hemingway: Yes, it was a good book, because it was an honest book, and that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud, unless you die gracefully, and then it's not only noble, but brave.
Ernest Hemingway: You're a writer. You make observations.
Ernest Hemingway: No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms grace and courage under pressure.
Gil Pender: Would you read it?
Ernest Hemingway: Your novel?
Gil Pender: Yeah. It's like looking for, you know, an opinion.
Ernest Hemingway: My opinion is I hate it.
Gil Pender: I mean, you haven't even read it.
Ernest Hemingway: If it's bad, I'll hate it because I hate bad writing, and if it's good, I'll be envious and hate it all the more. You don't want the opinion of another writer.
Ernest Hemingway: If you're a writer, declare yourself the best writer!
Ernest Hemingway: You'll never write well if you're afraid of dying.
Ernest Hemingway: I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino-hunters I know or Belmonte, who's truly brave. It is because they love with sufficient passion, to push death out of their minds, until it returns, as it does, to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.
Gertrude Stein: "Out of the Past was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation, had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp."
Adriana ?: Oh, the past has always had a great charisma for me.
Gil Pender: Oh, me, too. Great charisma for me. I always say that I was born too late.
Helen ?: Well, it's a shame you two didn't come to the movies with us last night, We saw a wonderfully funny American film.
Inez ?: Who was in it?
Helen ?: Oh, I don't know. I forget the name.
Gil Pender: Wonderful but forgettable, that sounds like a picture I've seen. I probably wrote it.
Helen ?: Well, I know it was moronic and infantile, and utterly lacking in any wit or believability, but John and I laughed in spite of all that.
Cole Porter: (You Do Something to Me)
...that simply mystifies me
Tell me why should it be
You have the power to hypnotize me
Adriana ?: You're interesting, too, in a lost way.
Gil Pender: But do you think that's possible, to love two women at once?
?: Well, he loved them both, but in a different way. Gil Pender: You know, that's very... that's very French. You guys are way, you know, much more evolved in that department than we are.
Gertrude Stein: We all fear death, and question our place in the universe. The artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
Cole Porter: (Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love)
And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
In Spain, the best upper-sets do it
Lithuanians and Letts do it
...
Oysters down in Oyster Bay do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Cold Cape Cod clams 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, Let's fall in love
Gil Pender: Adriana, if you stay here, and this becomes your present, then, pretty soon, you'll start imagining another time was really your, you know, was really the golden time. That's what the present is; that it's a little unsatisfying, because life's a little unsatisfying.
Adriana ?: That's the problem with writers, you are so full of words.
Gil Pender: The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner, and he was right.
