Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

I'm a man without a corporation.

I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.

I don't belong to anyone.

I will not bond. I will not share. I refuse to nurture.

I have freedom. But freedom means total selfishness. It means nobody cares much what you do.

Running is the one part of my life in which I fundamentally feel like the observer instead of the observed.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.

You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.

To be free is often to be lonely.

I'm a sign painter with no boss.

I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.

To be no part of any body, is to be nothing.

Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.

And when you don't have to talk to the person next to you, that's real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.

And if you couldn't be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone.

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

No, I don't have a boyfriend, I don't want one.

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.

I don't want to wear what every other women wears. I won't be dictated to.

Some people dye their hair yellow or put rings in their noses. I decided I wasn't going to open an account. Put it the other way round - there was no reason that I should.

It is only when a man is alone that he is really free.

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.