They may be some younger readers out there who can’t tell right away what Hollywood guy is reputed to have said the following with a straight face, but whose wisdom is actually under-rated at times:

(a) “Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn’t go see it”; (b) “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive”; (c) “Don’t pay any attention to the critics — don’t even ignore them”; (d) “I don’t think anyone should write his autobiography until after he’s dead”; (e) “That’s the way with these directors, they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg”; (g) “I don’t want yes-men around me — I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs”; (h) “You’ve got to take the bull between your teeth”; (i) “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day”; and (j) “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

Take the first line and turn it around a bit and you’ve got Lem Dobbs‘ classic line from The Limey — “You could see the sea out there if you could see it.” And I agree with the smart idiot-stupid genius comment — he’s saying he’d rather listen to an uneducated guy with horse sense than a PhD with his thumb up his ass. And some of the other lines aren’t so bad. The only emphatically dumb ones are (h) and (j).