Activity

Interviewer: Before you wrote plays, did you write anything else?

Hellman: Yes, short stories, a few poems. A couple of the stories were printed in a long-dead magazine called The Paris Comet for which Arthur Kober worked. Arthur and I were married and living in Paris. Let's see, about 1928, 192…

Celine: Oh, she couldn't, it wasn't within her reach. She'd have thought it all coarse, and then she didn't read books, she wasn't the kind of woman who reads. She didn't have any vanity at all. She kept on working till her death. I was in prison. I heard she had died. No, I was just arriving in Co…

Celine: [...] My mother worshiped rich people, you see. So what do you expect, it colored me too. I wasn't quite convinced. No. But I didn't dare have an opinion, no, no. My mother who was in lace up to her neck would never have dreamed of wearing any. That was for the customers. Never. It wasn't d…

Celine: [...] It was extreme poverty. Tougher than poverty, because in poverty you can let yourself go, degenerate, get drunk, but this was poverty which keeps up, dignified poverty. It was terrible. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old l…

Cocteau: I will recount one thing; then vou must let me rest. You perhaps know the work of the painter Domergue? The long calendar art, I am afraid. He had a domestique in those days —a "housemaid" who would make the beds, fill the coal scuttles. We all gathered in those days at the Cafe Rotonde. A…