- " A year earlier, he [George] had pinned his hopes on the prewar bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, had memorized whole sections of it and tried to carve out a new life based on this sunny-side-up attitude. The first time he encountered Biff Tannen had negated all his efforts. According to Dale Carnegie, the book's author, a man cannot remain hostile to you if you show him you're sincerely interested in him. Biff Tannen had not only remained hostile, he had rubbed a hero sandwich in George's face after George spent nearly a quarter hour testing his new philosophy on him. / Girl proved no more malleable. Approaching them with a new positive attitude caused them to regard George McFly not only as a creep, but also as an insincere creep. Even his parents avoided George during the time he was under the sway of Mr. Carnegie, instinctively distrusting his strangely outgoing disposition. / And so George had retreated into himself again. "The hell with it," he said. "Let those who like me like me for what I am." It sounded good to say this, except that he couldn't say for sure who it was that liked him. "
- —From Back to the Future by George Gipe (quote, pages 165 and 166)
How to Win Friends and Influence People was a book that George McFly read in 1954. However, instead of helping him be more social, the advice he took from it made people — with the exception of Biff Tannen, who rubbed a hero sandwich in George's face — stay even farther away from him.
Behind the scenes
- The book How to Win Friends and Influence People actually exists, as written by self-help writer Dale Carnegie in 1936.
