A Quote by John Lahr

Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

Quote Topics

Age American American Cars Century Dream Fifties Fins Furniture Golden Golden Age Like Momentum Shapes Side Story Tail Twentieth Twentieth Century West West Side West Side Story

Quote Author

John Lahr
American - Critic
Born: July 12, 1941

The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?

Brigid Brophy

The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity.

Lewis Mumford

In high school, my first thing ever was I played Tony in 'West Side Story' when I was about 17. I was a really shy kid, and I just, like, forced myself to learn how to sing this one month because I loved 'West Side Story' so much, and I somehow managed to get the role.

Paulo Costanzo

The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.

John Steinbeck

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

John Lahr

At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.

Karen Armstrong

In my youth, cinemas showed two films in one day. I used to watch both of them. It may sound strange, but 'West Side Story' was the only musical I liked. I didn't like musicals, or films with songs, at all. I always thought they were not real, that the songs sounded a little bit false. But in the case of 'West Side Story,' things were different.

Ennio Morricone

In the early years of the Roaring Twenties, American women not only won the right to vote but they also earned headlines along side their male counterparts during the Golden Age of American sports. Michael Bohn shares an engaging story of how two sports heroines, tennis player Helen Wills and swimmer Gertrude Ederle, helped embolden women to seek self-fulfillment by challenging the status quo.

Donna de Varona

In 1957, “West Side Story” had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; “Bye Bye Birdie,” set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

John Lahr

In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

John Lahr

The whole mythological side of 'Twin Peaks' was really down to me, and I've always known about the Theosophical writers and that whole group around the Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century - W. B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and a woman called Alice Bailey, a very interesting writer.

Mark Frost

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

Professor Galbraith is horrified by the number of Americans who have bought cars with tail fins on them, and I am horrified by the number of Americans who take seriously the proposals of Mr. Galbraith.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

The reason American cars don't sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That's why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.