“Nobody knows anything,” is one of the many brilliant phrases from one of my favorite authors, William Goldman. Mr. Goldman created a host of phrases (and ideas and principles) that we use every day as if they have always been part of ordinary language.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
- “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.”
- “I keep asking myself the same question, ‘How can I be so damn stupid as to keep comin’ back here?'”
- “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
- “When I was your age, television was called books.”
- “Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”
- “Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!”
- “We’ll never survive!”
”Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” - "Get used to disappointment.”
- “You seem a decent fellow," Inigo said. "I hate to kill you."
You seem a decent fellow," answered the man in black. "I hate to die.” - "You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?”
All the President’s Men
- “We’re under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there–not that I want it to worry you–nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there—(still building)—but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I’m gonna lose my temper.
- “Follow the money.”
The Ghost and the Darkness
- “Have you ever failed?
”Only in life.”
- “Wow! Brains as well as boobs.”
Adventures in the Screen Trade
- “It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.”
- “The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”
- “I write out of revenge.”
- “A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite.”
- “You can never trust what you read.”
- “There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.”
- “One of my great breaks is that I have only done work I wanted to do.”
- “Nobody knows anything.”
- “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.”
When I was young, in my 20s if you can imagine that, anything William Goldman wrote, I read. His first book, The Temple of Gold,. came out when I was nine and I didn’t read it until I was in my 20s, but I was a 25-year-old fan by the time The Princess Bride was released, in 1973. I read that book to my daughters when they were babies and they grew up knowing the story as if it were a traditional fable. In 1987, when the Bride movie finally came out, we were all living in California and saw the movie in one of the Orange County theaters where Rob Reiner liked to first showcase his films. (We saw the 1984 premier of This Is Spinal Tap in the same theater, because my employer—QSC Audio—had provided some technical assistance for the film,) Apparently, not many people ever saw The Princess Bride in a theater, but millions or billions have seen it on VHS or DVD. For people who loved words, for 25 years years, William Goldman was a writer’s writer. It would have been hard to imagine he could be forgotten.
And that, finally, brings me to the fucking point of this screed.
Last week, I decided to do one of my semi-regular William Goldman binges and when I went to my local library organization I discovered the regional library system only owned one William Goldman book, in hard copy, and not a single one of his books in eBook format. (Have I mentioned that I have grown to really dislike paper books?) So, I read Adventures in the Screen Trade again and put as many Goldman books as I could find in the state’s MNLink system on reserve. The first of the MNLink books arrived yesterday,. Magic, and it came from the Raugust Library, Jamestown College. That’s Jamestown, North Dakota! It is a very beat-up paperback 1977 first printing copy that dramatically demonstrates how far from today’s consciousness one of the most famous American writers has fallen. Magic was described as “One of those once-in-a-generation novels that changes everything” and, today, the only copy of the book the Minnesota state library system can find is in a North Dakota college. I had to look it up, Jamestown is a 15,000 person shriveling burg halfway between Fargo and Bismarck. It is “the ninth largest city in North Dakota,” for whatever that is worth.
A few years ago, my step-sister made one of her fairly regular attempts to convince me of life-after-death. I shoulda kept it, but it was a picture of some old people practically crawling over each other in some kind of celestial ecstasy with the caption, “Wouldn’t you wish for this if you could have it?” Or something equally weird. For me, the answer is consistently “no.” As Mr. Goldman would have said, “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.” After you’re dead, you can’t have anything. Wishin’ and hopin’ won’t change anything about that, either. As Mr. Goldman’s fading fame proves, after you’re dead you just vanish from everything; no matter how famous, rich, powerful, or irritating you may have been in life. When you’re dead, you are not just dead, you are gone.
As an afterthought, I wanted to figure out who that North Dakota college library was named after. What I got when I tried to search for that information on the Jamestown College website was a “Page not found. The requested page was not found.” I suppose Mr. or Mrs. Raugust were North Dakota rich people, emulating Andrew Carnegie’s tactic of creating libraries all over the country to paper-over his vicious robber baron history. Even Carnegie’s massive effort is fading from history since “The USA had 1,689 public libraries built thanks to Carnegie grants. Of those, about 750 are still functioning as libraries today.” Outside of New York City, where 31 of Carnegie’s 39 original libraries are still functioning, greedy old Andy’s buildings are mostly gone or converted to other less-respectable or admirable purposes. Today, however, Carnegie’s most substantial “invention,” vertical integration (the act of controlling every step of production, promotion, and marketing an industry; aka monopolies) are well and thriving. The robber baron’s best friend, Ronald Reagan, tossed out every progressive move the country had made since Abraham Lincoln in 8 brutal, avarice years (Remember “Greed is good?”) and, today, the Bezos, Musks, Zuckerbergs, Pages, Brins, Kochs, and the rest of the billionaires who own the nation’s governments are having a field day with . . . everything.
The good news is that they will die and disappear with no more of a trace or memory than Carnegie. The bad news is that the good and great, like William Goldman will suffer the same fate.
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