"They got to calling me 'Frozen Face', 'Blank Pan', 'Hole in the Donut'.. oh I had some beautiful names." (wav)
'"It is hard sometimes," he confided. "I particularly remember one time
in Philadelphia, where I went to attend the opening of one of the Loew
theatres. We paraded up and down the streets in automobiles and I had on my
serious expression. Lots of little kids yelled, 'Why don't yer give us a
smile. Somebody tickle him and make him laugh,' and so on, and it was hard
that time not to burst right out laughing."'
October 21, 1923
Dorothy Day
NEW YORK TELEGRAPH
"We eliminated subtitles just as fast as we could if we could possibly tell it in action. Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: who could do the feature film with the least subtitles? Charlie won that. He had this picture down to something like twenty-one titles. I had twenty-three. The average picture had 240 titles. The most I ever used was fifty-six."
"I guess I was one of those original do-it-yourself fellas. I may not know how to do a carpenter's job, but I set up to build a house. Everybody knows you're going to get into trouble when you start that."
"There are certain characters you don't hit with a pie. Hit the wrong person, the audience gets mad at you.
"You hit girls with pies, lots of them."
"Oh, that they didn't mind. I remember a lot of people wanting to hit Lillian Gish because she was so sweet and innocent."
interview by Studs Terkel, 1960
"I've simply been brought up being knocked down."
~~Buster Keaton,
Picture-Play Magazine, 1920.
(BusterKeaton.com)
"This seems to lead to the question of how you find your gags. Do you get them from the set, things in the decor ... ?"
"Yes, props, and characters, and everything, and then look for the simplest things to go wrong. And that leads to bigger things. But there is nothing worse with us than a misplaced gag. Someone may suggest a good gag, or even an excellent one, but if it doesn't fit the story I'm doing and I try to drag it in, then it looks dragged in on the screen. So it's much better to save it, until some time when it does fit what I'm doing."
--"Sight & Sound" interview 1965