Life & Wisdom Quote by Joe Eszterhas

Eszterhas draws a hard line between what we are and what we do on autopilot, and that’s the point: to strip smoking of its romantic alibis. Calling cigarettes “not a part of human behaviour” is a deliberate demotion. “Behaviour” suggests something expressive, social, even identity-linked; a cigarette in the hand can read as attitude, rebellion, noir cool. “Habit,” by contrast, is mechanical, repeatable, unglamorous. It’s the language of routines, not personalities.

The intent is corrective and slightly prosecutorial. Eszterhas isn’t arguing about morality; he’s arguing about framing. If smoking is “behaviour,” it can be defended as choice, culture, character. If it’s a “habit,” it becomes something closer to a glitch in the system - learned, reinforced, and therefore interruptible. That framing matters because the tobacco industry sold cigarettes as symbols before it sold them as nicotine delivery. The quote tries to repossess the narrative: you’re not acting out a self; you’re servicing a dependency.

There’s subtext here that fits a writer’s sensibility: he understands how props become character shorthand. Cinema and advertising taught audiences to read cigarettes as punctuation marks for adult complexity. Eszterhas yanks that punctuation away. The sentence is blunt on purpose, almost like a screenplay direction: stop treating the cigarette as motivation. It’s not backstory. It’s conditioning.