Barton Fink (1991)

John Mahoney: W.P. Mayhew

Photos 

Quotes 

• W.P. Mayhew : I close my eyes I can almost smell the live oak.

  Audrey Taylor : That's chicken fat, Bill.

  W.P. Mayhew : Well, my olfactory's turning womanish on me; lying and deceitful.

• [in an off-screen drunken rampage] 

  W.P. Mayhew : Honey! Where's my honey?

• Barton Fink : W.P. Mayhew? The writer?

  W.P. Mayhew : Just Bill, please.

  Barton Fink : Bill! You're the finest novelist of our time.

• W.P. Mayhew : I pays my baby love and she pays me back with pity. The basest coin there is...

• W.P. Mayhew : Mister Fink, they have not invented a genre of picture that Bill Mayhew has not, at one time or other, been invited to essay. Yes, I have taken my stab at the rasslin' form, as I have stabbed at so many others, and with as little success. I gather that you are a freshman here, eager for an upperclassman's counsel. However, just at the moment, I have drinking to do. Why don't you stop by my bungalow, which is number fifteen, later on this afternoon, and we will discuss rasslin' scenarios and other things lit'rary.

• W.P. Mayhew : You are dripping, sir.

• W.P. Mayhew : Me I just enjoy making things up. Yessah escape. Its when I can't write I can't escape myself, I want to rip my head off and run screaming down the street with my balls in a fruit pickers pail.

• W.P. Mayhew : [singing]  Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, gone are my friends from the cotton fields away, gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear the gentle voices calling, old black Joe. I'm coming I'm coming, oh my head is bending low, I hear the gentle... the truth my honey is a tart that does not bear scrutiny. Breach my levee at your own peril!

• W.P. Mayhew : Did I ever tell you the story of Solomon's Mammy?

• W.P. Mayhew : I'm buildin' up a levy one brick at a time...

• W.P. Mayhew : Me, well, I just like makin' things up.

• Barton Fink : My God, I had no idea you were in Hollywood.

  W.P. Mayhew : All of us undomesticated writers eventually make our way out here to the Great Salt Lake.

  [takes the cap off of an alcohol flask] 

  W.P. Mayhew : That's probably why I always have such a powerful thirst.