Literary Birthday – 22 July – Bryan Forbes

Bryan Forbes was born 22 July 1926, and died 8 May 2013.

Eight Quotes

Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.
Nothing recedes like success.
An actor must have arrogance, conceit…I would never have made it as an actor, but I still have conceit.
I may not have come up the hard way, but I have come up the whole way.
I was a writer who became an actor who became a screenwriter who became a director.
I remember saying to this particular savagely disturbed woman [who was protesting The Stepford Wives], ‘You’ve missed the whole point. A, it’s fantasy; B, if anybody looks stupid, it’s the men. It’s not an attack on women, it’s an attack on women being exploited by men.’
Life is pretty grotty, and anything that brings back a little Romanticism to life is not to be despised.
I have often found that, although we dump things, part of the egg remains and starts to gestate. We pull them out of our subconscious years later and use them again in a different project.

Bryan Forbes was an English film director, screenwriter, film producer, actor, and novelist. His books included International Velvet, The Rewrite Man, and The Soldier’s Story. He was well known as the director of the films, The Stepford Wives, Whistle Down the Wind, and King Rat. He also wrote several screenplays, including The League of Gentlemen.