What Makes Sammy Run? Quotes

“Work hard, and if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“Most of us are ready to greet our worst enemies like long-lost brothers if we think they can show us a good time, if we think they can do us any good or if we even reach the conclusion that being polite will get us just as far and help us live longer.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“They looked at each other until they weren't acquaintances any longer.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“I believed him because the truth is never hard to recognize. Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“We only hate the results of people. But people, Henry, aren’t just results. They’re a process.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“When we left, the sun was taking its evening dip, slipping down into the ocean inch by inch like a fat woman afraid of the water.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“It made me uncomfortable. I guess I've always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed, afraid to look back and see where they’ve come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“You're physically incapable of having friends. All you can ever have are enemies and stooges.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“When Kit called me for the next meeting I was either not myself or too much myself.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“The principal furniture in Billie's mind was a good-sized bed.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over Monsoon. In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned his right to monopolize conversations or his ability to do it entertainingly. And then there was his colossal lack of perspective. This was one of his most valuable gifts, for perspective doesn't always pay. It can slow you down.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said.

"Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?"

"It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart."

I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.

"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books..."

"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“It's queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“All people seem to do is the best they can to get along and have a good time; and if that means keeping what they’ve got, they’re liable to become fascists; and if it means trying to get what they need and don’t have, there’s a good chance of their learning the Internationale.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implied deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldblum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“You—stink,” I ended lamely, so sore I couldn’t even try to be clever. “Okay, I stink,” he said, walking off, “but someday you’ll cut off an arm for one little whiff.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“There’s nothing like a rich man’s son who’s done a little starving, just enough to scare him into becoming a self-made man.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“We’re sorry for him because a germ he didn’t have anything to do with got inside him and twisted him out of shape. Maybe we ought to feel the same way about guys with twisted egos.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally to overtake him.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“A “Sammy” might become rich, powerful and famous, but you wouldn’t want him to marry your daughter. In fact, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him for fear he’d cop your watch, your story, your company, your wife, your life. The trouble was, Sammy lived by different rules from the rest of us; as the moralizing narrator Al Manheim puts it to him, “You never had the first idea of give-and-take … It had to be all you all the way. You had to make individualism the most frightening ism of all.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“how would you account for the mail Sammy drew from all over the country? From insurance companies in Hartford, from chain stores in the South, from mail-order houses in the Middle West, people were writing that I could not have written Sammy without personal knowledge of their own mail-room boy who had run over their backs to become office manager, and in some cases company president.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“Everybody does it.” No, not everybody does it; conscience and social responsibility are still alive if not too well in America. But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even seeming to realize that suffering is involved.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“The low-paid writers wanted the Guild to be a real bread-and-butter union, and the congenial five-hundred-dollar-a-week guys thought what writers needed most was a communal hangout like the old Writers’ Club where they could sit around and get to know each other. The twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-week writers with famous names seemed to be most interested in increasing their influence in picture productions and spoke fine, brave abstract words about the scope of the medium and dignifying the position of the screen writer.”
― Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?