Time & Perspective Quote by John Barrymore

Sex, in Barrymore's telling, is a comic efficiency machine: a brief act that somehow detonates hours, days, whole lives worth of fallout. The line works because it flattens the sacred and the scandalous into a neat bit of arithmetic. Time is the sober metric we use to make adulthood legible; "trouble" is the messy remainder that refuses to be measured. Put them together and you get a joke that doubles as a confession.

Barrymore was a matinee idol in an era when Hollywood sold glamour while feeding on moral panic. The public wanted its stars erotic but not explicit, transgressive but still "respectable". So the quip performs a tightrope act: it acknowledges sex as the engine of gossip, jealousy, illegitimacy, divorce, and reputational damage without ever naming any of it. "Trouble" is a deliberately elastic word, roomy enough to cover everything from tabloid humiliation to private regret. That vagueness is the point: the audience supplies its own memories.

There is also a sly defense mechanism here. By reducing sex to "the thing" and treating consequences as almost comically disproportionate, Barrymore shifts from culpability to inevitability. It's not that people make choices; it's that a tiny, ordinary human impulse comes with absurd transaction fees. For an actor whose personal life was famously turbulent, the humor reads as self-aware damage control: charm as absolution, wit as a way to admit the chaos without surrendering to it.