Fine Pinkwater wisdom. The final essay, Talit, is one of the best things he wrote. As are all the parts that are about dogs.
Quotes:
It doesn't matter who you are, or what you've done, or think you can do. There's a confrontation with destiny waiting for you. Somewhere, there is a chili you cannot eat.
"Ladies and gentlemen, get a load of this. There was a man, and he wanted to catch a train. So he said to his wife, 'Pack me a lunch!' And he went to the railway station, and he waited for his train, and he went to sleep, and he missed his train." Here Hassan would pause, his eyes sparkling, and then the punch line: "He was daft!"
"It's not just the joke, bosses. You have to know how to tell it."
The Chicken Man.
I didn't know movies were art. They were movies.
The traditional reason for sending a boy to military school was that he was an unmanageable, rotten little predelinquent. I never knew why my parents sent me.
Here's my policy regarding experts in creative writing: Ignore what they say. Ignore what they say when they tell you you're bad. Ignore what they say when they tell you you're good. It might be a good idea to ignore what I say too. May as well be thorough.
The people who have to do with books--picking them, publishing them, selling them and talking about them (and that includes me for today only)--have a way of treating everything like big A art and making sure it's small A art. They may mean well, but you can't trust them.
"This is your fault, you know." According to ancient tradition, the first person to get blamed is stuck with it.
See, what this guy was doing--even though it was his very own radio station--was trying to please the greatest number of people. Instead of getting the listeners used to what he knew was good, he was making sure they got what they liked already. He was losing that which made his station unique and intrinsically valuable.
It was your basic, Orthodox, bare-knuckles shul. All the congregants were from Poland, and most f them appeared to be ex-gangsters like my father. Guys with broken noses and gold teeth.
There were 360 opinions about the proper direction to face during prayer--and the Jews vied to be the first to finish reading a passage, after which they would slam the book shut and look around defiantly. Not one of them could understand Hebrew--just read it fast.
He sounded the way God would sound--if He'd had the lessons.
When we say we subscribe to the faith of our fathers, we usually mean the father we knew.
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