Youth

Fred Ballinger:
You were right. Music is all I understand.

Fred Ballinger:
Intellectuals have no taste.

Mick Boyle:
[as he shows his protegee the distant Alps through a telescope] You see that mountain over there? Everything seems really close. That's the future. And now... [as he flips the telescope around so it's in fish eye lens]... everything seems really far away. That's the past.

Mick Boyle:
We are all extras. All we have is emotions.

Lena Ballinger:
You know, sometimes when I'm asleep at night, he watches me... and last night he stroked my cheek for the first time in my life. Only I wasn't asleep... I was pretending to be asleep.

Mick Boyle:
Parents know when their children are pretending to be asleep.

Fred Ballinger:
You won't fool me. I know you can't levitate.

Mick Boyle:
You say that emotions are overrated. But that's bullshit. Emotions are all we've got.

Brenda Morel:
C'mon, life goes on even without that cinema bullshit.

Jimmy Tree:
I have to choose, I have to choose what is really worth telling: horror or desire? And I choose desire. You, each one of you, you open my eyes, you made me see that I should not wasting my time on the senseless fear...

Mick Boyle:
That's a totally asinine idea. Who else?

Queen's Emissary:
Why exactly do you find the monarchy endearing?

Fred Ballinger:
Well, because it's so vulnerable. You eliminate one person. And all of a sudden. The whole world changes. Like in a marriage.

Fred Ballinger:
Levity is an irresistible temptation.

Fred Ballinger:
Because levity also a perversion.

Lena Ballinger:
You are victim of your own apathies, Daddy.

Mick Boyle:
I read somewhere that tear ducts can produce tears for three days without stop.

Lena Ballinger:
And what does she do?

Fred Ballinger:
The most obscene job in the world.

Lena Ballinger:
She is a prostitute?

Lena Ballinger:
Worse. She is a pop star.

Screenwriter in Love:
You've been watching too many movies, you idiot, you've forgotten what life is about.

Fred Ballinger:
I'm wondering what happens to your memory over time. I can't remember my family. I don't remember their faces or how they talked. Last night I was watching Lena while she was asleep. And I was thinking about all the thousands of little things that I done for her as her father. And I done them deliberately so that she would remember them. When she grows up. But in time. She won't remember a single thing.

Mick Boyle:
I have to believe in everything in order to make things up.

Fred Ballinger:
I don't know what the problem is. But I'm not going to try and cheer you up by lying. Or talk about things I never knew about.

Mick Boyle:
Do you see that mountain over there?

Girl Screenwriter:
Yes. It looks very close.

Mick Boyle:
Exactly. This is what you see when you're young. Everything seems really close. And that's the future. And now. And that's what you see when you're old. Everything seems really far away. That's the past.

Lena Ballinger:
Bathtubs are more dangerous than Everest.

Luca Moroder:
How true.

Miss Universe:
I appreciate the irony, but when it is drenched in poison, it is drained of its force and reveals something else.

Jimmy Tree:
What?

Miss Universe:
Frustration.

Pale Teenager:
When your son says, 'Why weren't you a father to me?' And you say, 'I didn't think I was up to it.' At that moment, I understood some really important.

Jimmy Tree:
What?

Pale Teenager:
That no one in the world feels up to it, so there is no reason to worry.

Mick Boyle:
She says I lost so much time because of you, Michael. I lost the best years of my life.

Jimmy Tree:
I want to tell about your desire, my desire. So pure, so impossible, so immoral. But it doesn't matter because that's what makes us alive.

Screenwriter in Love:
Goes where the wind blows.

Mick Boyle:
Which is what we all do.

Mick Boyle:
It doesn't make a difference! Men, artists, animals... plants! We're all just extras.

Diva:
Okay, you win. I'll go to bed with you, on one condition: that you don't come. That way, Frank... that way, you'll never forget me.

Mick Boyle:
You know, I've come to understand something, Fred. That people are either beautiful or ugly, and the ones in between are merely cute.

Fred Ballinger:
We only ever told each other the good things.

Fred Ballinger:
Children, don't know their parents ordeals. Sure, they know certain details, striking elements. And they know what they need to know to be on one side or the other. They don't know that I trembled the first time I ever saw you on stage. All the orchestra behind my back were laughing at my falling in love. And my unexpected fragility. They don't know that you sold of your mother's jewellery in order to help me with my second piece. When everyone else was turning me down calling me presumptuous inelegant musician. They don't know that you too, and you were right that you thought I was a presumptuous, inelegant musician at that time. And you cried so hard. Not because you sold you mother's jewellery but because you sold your mother. They don't know that we were together. You and I. Despite all the exhaustion, and the pain, and hardship. Melanie. They must never know that you and I despite everything liked to think of ourselves as a simple song.

Jimmy Tree:
Tell me about Stravinsky.

Fred Ballinger:
Well, he once said intellectuals had no taste. And from that moment on, I did everything I could not to become an intellectual. And I succeeded.

Lena Ballinger:
You know, he said the reason he couldn't conduct the Simple Songs was because my mother's the only person on Earth who could sing them.

Mick Boyle:
He said that?

Lena Ballinger:
He said that to the queen's emissary.

Mick Boyle:
It took him eighty years to finally say something romantic, and he goes and says it to the queen's emissary.

Brenda Morel:
Human beings really know how to be pathetic when they try to, huh?