John Mahoney credited as playing...
W.P. Mayhew
- 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.
- Barton Fink: W.P. Mayhew? The writer?
- W.P. Mayhew: Just Bill, please.
- Barton Fink: [voice cracking] Bill! You're the finest novelist of our time.
- 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: 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!
- 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.