- Helen Sinclair: Two martinis please, very dry.
- David Shayne: How'd you know what I drank?
- Helen Sinclair: Oh, you want one too? Three.
- Helen Sinclair: No, no, don't speak. Don't speak. Please don't speak. Please don't speak. No. No. No. Go. Go, gentle Scorpio, go. Your Pisces wishes you every happy return.
- David Shayne: Just one...
- Helen Sinclair: Don't speak.
- Olive: [reading her lines] Why do you have to be so masso... masso...
- David Shayne: Masochistic.
- Olive: Masochistic? What the does that mean?
- David Shayne: It means someone who enjoys pain.
- Olive: Enjoys pain? What is she, *retarded*?
- Sheldon Flender: You, you, you're all missing the point, the point is I can give pleasure many times a day!
- Rita: Oh, now, really Flender, what does quantity got to do with it?
- Sheldon Flender: Quantity, quantity affects quality!
- David Shayne: Says who?
- Sheldon Flender: Karl Marx!
- Rita: Oh, so now we're talking economics.
- Sheldon Flender: Sex is economics!
- Sheldon Flender: [bragging] I have never had a play produced. That's right. And I've written one play a year for the past twenty years.
- David Shayne: Yes, but that's because you're a genius. And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent. Means you're a genius.
- Helen Sinclair: You stand on the brink of greatness. The world will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina.
- Olive: Hey, didn't I tell you to make "horse durves"?
- Venus: I don't make nothin' out of horses, especially "horse durves", 'cause I don't know what they are, and neither do you.
- Olive: Oh, aren't you the big mouth since you hit your number!
- [raising her voice]
- Olive: And I said the imported stuff!
- Venus: The imported stuff ate through the bottle! It's gone!
- Olive: A likely story!
- [composing herself - to David]
- Olive: It's very hard to get good help these days.
- David Shayne: I studied playwrighting with every teacher, I read every book...
- Cheech: Let me tell you somethin' about teachers. I hate teachers. Those blue-haired bitches used to whack us with rulers. Forget teachers.
- Helen Sinclair: She's perky all right. She makes you want to sneak up behind her with a pillow and suffocate her.
- Nick: Sorry you guys had to hear that. Some problems with the firm.
- David Shayne: Really? What type of firm is it, Nick?
- Nick: It's a "don't stick your nose in other people's business and it won't get broken" type of firm.
- [Helen is late for rehearsal]
- Helen Sinclair: Please forgive me. My pedicurist had a stroke. She fell forward onto the orange stick and plunged it into my toe. It required bandaging.
- David Shayne: Maybe Olive's got stage fright. Maybe she won't show.
- Julian Marx: Not Olive. That dame doesn't have a nerve in her body. I don't think her spinal cord touches her brain.
- David Shayne: Your taste is exquisite.
- Helen Sinclair: [correcting] My taste is superb. My eyes are exquisite.
- David Shayne: You're gonna write it?
- Cheech: What am I? A fuckin' idiot? They taught me how to read and write in school before I burned it down.
- David Shayne: You burned down your school?
- Cheech: Yeah, it was Lincoln's birthday. There was nobody there.
- David Shayne: You thought my first draft was c-cerebral and tepid?
- Helen Sinclair: Only the plot and the dialogue. But this...
- David Shayne: Was-was-was there nothing in the original draft that you feel was worth saving?
- Helen Sinclair: The stage directions were lucid. Best I've ever seen... and the color of the binder. Good choice.
- David Shayne: Thank you. I've always had a flair for stage directions.
- Helen Sinclair: Make love to me.
- David Shayne: Here? Now?
- Helen Sinclair: I see no reason to wait.
- David Shayne: Jerome Kern is on the other side of the door.
- Helen Sinclair: Yes, he's a wonderful composer. You'll have to meet him. Now hang up your pants.
- Eden Brent: There you are. Mr. Purcell, you have been stealing our dog yummies and eating them.
- Warner Purcell: Absolutely not. That's an outrageous suggestion.
- Eden Brent: Then let me see in your pockets.
- Warner Purcell: Would I eat dog food?
- Eden Brent: You'd eat anything that didn't eat you first, you big fat pot of helium.
- David Shayne: I've become involved with Helen Sinclair, and I feel terrible. But I can't help myself. She's so charismatic, and she's brilliant and beautiful. I mean, a real artist, and, and we speak the same language.
- Sheldon Flender: You're wracked with guilt.
- David Shayne: I'm wracked with guilt.
- Sheldon Flender: You're wracked with guilt. You are wracked with guilt.
- David Shayne: I don't know whether... I can't sleep.
- Sheldon Flender: Guilt is petit-bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.
- David Shayne: I know that. I know...
- Sheldon Flender: Well? What is the problem then? I'm gonna give you some advice. The same advice that was given to me many years ago when I had a very similar dilemma.
- David Shayne: Similar to mine. To...
- Sheldon Flender: Yes. Yes.
- David Shayne: What did you do? What?
- Sheldon Flender: You gotta do what you gotta do.
- Helen Sinclair: We're having dinner Sunday night with Gene O'Neill. He's heard that your writing is morbid and depressing. He's dying to meet you.
- [Cheech is helping Olive rehearse a scene]
- Olive: Can't you see? You're living out the exact same pattern your mother lived out with your father.
- Cheech: I am? Pray tell.
- Olive: In some way you're trying to relive it and in the process of reliving it, correct it. As if that were possible. HA.
- Cheech: It don't say "ha."
- Olive: I know it don't say "ha," I added that.
- Cheech: Are you allowed to do that? I don't think you're allowed to do that.
- Olive: We're allowed to add things. It's called ad-libbing.
- Cheech: Well, I think the whole thing stinks.
- Olive: Well, I think you're a degenerate zombie so shut up and read.
- Cheech: You shut up.
- Olive: You shut up and read.
- Cheech: You're lucky you're Nick's girl.
- Olive: You're lucky you're an idiot.
- Sid Loomis: You're a star because you're great and you are a great star, but let me tell you something, Helen. In the last couple of years you're better known as an adulteress and a drunk. And I say this in all due respect.
- Helen Sinclair: Look, I haven't had a drink since New Year's Eve.
- Sid Loomis: You're talking Chinese New Year's.
- Helen Sinclair: Naturally. Still, that's two days, Sid! You know how long that is for me?
- Nick: Open your gift.
- Olive: You open it, can't you see I'm dressing?
- Nick: Here.
- Olive: What is it?
- Nick: Pearls. What the hell do you think they are?
- Olive: Pearls are white.
- Nick: These are black pearls.
- Olive: Oh, don't give me that. I never heard of black pearls.
- Nick: Just becaus you never heard of them don't mean it don't exist.
- Olive: What do think I am, some kind of chump? They're black for God's sake. They probably came from defective oysters.
- Cheech: She can't act. Are you listening to me? She makes stuff not work - stuff she ain't even in - it comes out all twisted!
- Sheldon Flender: Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?
- [Helen complains about her role]
- Helen Sinclair: She's dowdy. Sid, the ingenue has all the hot lines. Even the female psychiatrist is a better role.
- Sid Loomis: But the role of Sylvia Poston is the lead.
- Helen Sinclair: "Sylvia Poston." Even the *name* reeks of Orbach's. I do Electra. I do Lady Macbeth. I do plays by Noel and Phil Barry, or at least Max Anderson.
- Cheech: Sylvia Pincus. Big fat Jewish broad, had a little tiny husband. She chopped him up with an ax and mailed his pieces all over the country. I don't know what she was tryin' to prove.
- Sid Loomis: It's a little idea she's wanted to do for years. She plays Jesus' mother.
- Partygoer: Oh.
- Sid Loomis: It's a whole Oedipal thing - he loves her, wants to do in the father. Well, you can see the complications. Of course, we're talking to Ira Gershwin about a modern musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "Quasimodo Jones."
- Partygoer: Helen has such a-a-a... a new vitality. Even her face looks so smooth.
- Sid Loomis: I know. The monkey glands are working.
- [at their first, harrowing meeting]
- Nick: Who wants a drink?
- David Shayne: I'll have a double anything.
- Helen Sinclair: [pointing wistfully out the train window, after taking a swig of paint remover] See the little towns going by.
- Sheldon Flender: You are racked with guilt.
- David Shayne: I can't sleep.
- Sheldon Flender: Guilt is petty bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.
- Helen Sinclair: Oh, Julian. Julian Marx. I do plays put on by Balasco, or Sam Harris, not some Yiddish pant salesman turned producer. My ex-husband used to say, "If you're gonna go down, go down with the best of them."
- Sid Loomis: Which ex-husband?
- Helen Sinclair: Oh, I don't know which ex-husband. The one with the moustache.
- Lord Chafee: My tongue is hanging out to present it on the London stage.
- David Shayne: London.
- Lord Chafee: Look at his face, Helen. You're going to be the toast of Broadway. Why not the West End, hmm?
- Sid Loomis: He's working on a vehicle for Helen for next season. She plays Jesus' mother. It's a whole Oedipul thing. He loves her... wants to do in the father... well you can see the complications.