W.P. Mayhew Quotes in Barton Fink (1991)

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.

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

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: 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!

[in an off-screen drunken rampage]

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

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: Did I ever tell you the story of Solomon's Mammy?

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

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