Quote of the Day (Sam Mendes, Differentiating Melodrama and Tragedy)

“I think to make a good tragedy you have to constantly threaten melodrama. You could say melodrama is badly written tragedy, and tragedy is well-written melodrama. It’s a very, very thin line. The difference between melodrama and tragedy is in detail and insight.”—English filmmaker and stage director Sir Sam Mendes, quoted by Heidi Julavits, “An Interview With Sam Mendes,” Believer Magazine, Issue Sixty-One, 2009

The image accompanying this post, showing Sam Mendes at during the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Musical opening night at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London UK, was taken on June 25, 2013, by Richard Goldschmidt.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Mayberry Drunk Otis Makes an Unexpected Visit to Jail)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “Otis, what are you doin' here? It's only Friday afternoon!”

Otis Campbell [played by Hal Smith]: “I decided to take a long weekend because of the holiday.”

Barney: “What holiday?”

Otis: “I think it's our anniversary.”

Barney: “Why ain't you home with your wife?”

Otis: “What kind of a holiday would that be?”— The Andy Griffith Show, Season 3, Episode 15, “Barney and the Governor,” original air date Jan. 7, 1963, teleplay by Bill Freedman and Henry Sharp, directed by Bob Sweeney

Quote of the Day (Helen Hunt Jackson, on October, ‘Lavish’ and ‘Scornful’)

“The spring-time holds her white and purple dear;
October, lavish, flaunts them far and near;
The summer charily her reds doth lay
Like jewels on her costliest array;
October, scornful, burns them on a bier.”—American poet, fiction, and travel writer Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), “October,” in Verses (1888), reprinted in The Pioneer Valley Reader, edited by James C. O’Connell (1995)

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on How His Wife Saved 'Carrie'—And His Writing Career)

“[Carrie, his first book] started as a short story. It was going to be one of these stories I sold to Cavalier or Swank or one of those magazines — I had not stepped up to Penthouse at that point. I started it and saw it was going to be longer than a short story, and I threw it away. My wife [Tabitha] picked it out of the trash, smoothed out the pages that I'd written, and she said: ‘This is good. You should go on with this.’ I said, ‘I don't know anything about girls' locker rooms.’ She said, ‘I will tell you everything you need to know.’”—American horror-fiction author Stephen King quoted by Jeremy Egner, “He Is the King,” The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2026

(The image accompanying this post shows Sissy Spacek in the iconic locker-room scene in the 1976 film adaptation of Carrie.)

Quote of the Day (Patricia Highsmith, on Efforts to Solve the Mystery of the Mind)

“The eternal, unanswerable questions, the efforts to solve the mystery and the intent repeat themselves through the centuries….Psychology and psychiatry, the new sciences, are peculiar in that dealing with the mind ... they have not brought us closer to the solving of this mystery.” —American novelist and short-story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), 1961 journal entry, in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995, edited by Anna von Planta (2021)

Later this week, the psychological thriller A Talent for Murder, starring Dame Helen Mirren as Highsmith, will go into limited release here in the U.S. 

The Oscar-winning actress will be playing one of the most fiendishly complex roles of her legendary career in tackling the brilliant but racist, anti-semitic, and altogether misanthropic author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and other crime thrillers.

Quote of the Day (Jon Cryer, on the Awful Cost of Working With Charlie Sheen for So Long)

"I worked with Charlie Sheen for eight years. And if you wonder what it's like to work with Charlie Sheen for eight years, when I started, I had hair."—American Emmy-winning actor Jon Cryer, on working with Sheen on the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi (2025)

Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if ol’ Charlie had shared a little of that “tiger blood” he talked about in one of the manic interviews that “facilitated” his departure from the long-running sitcom.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on ‘Those Who Humble Themselves Before the Lord')

“Only those who humble themselves before the Lord can experience the greatness of his mercy.” — Pope Francis (1936-2025), tweet of Sept. 16, 2016