Quotes by Humorists - Page 24

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
P.G. Wodehouse
Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.
Dave Barry
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
Mark Twain
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
Mark Twain
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
P.G. Wodehouse
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
Mark Twain
From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
P.G. Wodehouse
I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
P.G. Wodehouse
Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!
Dave Barry
You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Write what you know.
Mark Twain
Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.
Mark Twain
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
David Sedaris
I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Mark Twain
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.
P.G. Wodehouse
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:"Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses held by seaweed?" Harris would take you by the arm, and say:"I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no time."Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:"So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.
Jerome K. Jerome
Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.
Mark Twain
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Robert Benchley
But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
Mark Twain
I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?
Mark Twain
The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.
David Sedaris
I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
Mark Twain
My sister, Judy, has always said that she would like to lie in state, propped up in her coffin with her eyes blared wide open, face fixed in a big grin, and have a taped greeting for all her mourners. Something real upbeat and, well, live-sounding, like: 'He-e-e-ey!Cuteshoestellyomamahi!
Jill Conner Browne
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
Dave Barry
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
Will Rogers
But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.
Mark Twain
Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.
David Sedaris
There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.
Josh Billings
Happiness is the feeling we experience when we are too busy to be miserable.
Thomas L. Masson
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy...to wit--the wag of a dog's tail.
Josh Billings
Do the best you can, and don't take life too serious.
Will Rogers
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
Mark Twain
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
Mark Twain
It’s only when you’re at the bottom of the ladder that you ascend.
Gina Barreca
Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.
Arnold H. Glasow
In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.
Gina Barreca
So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.
Mark Twain
One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.
Josh Billings
A proof once established is better left so.
Mark Twain
I'll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on, again. It's the sure way, and the only sure way;
Mark Twain
Human nature is all alike.
Mark Twain
Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'.
Mark Twain
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
Josh Billings
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
Mark Twain
Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!
Mark Twain
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Mark Twain
a wise woman puts a grain of sugar in everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
Helen Rowland
We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.
Jerome K. Jerome
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
Mark Twain
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain
Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it.
Josh Billings
(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.
Jerome K. Jerome
There better not be a God because I'll be in big trouble.
Patricia Marx
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.
Erma Bombeck
Bizim hepimizin içinde zübüklük olmasa, bizler de birer zübük olmasak, aramızdan böyle zübükler büyüyemezdi. Hepimizde birer parça olan zübüklük birleşip işte başımıza böyle zübükler çıkıyor. Oysa zübüklük bizde, bizim içimizde. Onları biz, kendi zübüklüğümüzden yaratıyoruz. Sonra, kendi zübüklüklerimizin bir tek Zübük’de birleştiğini görünce ona kızıyoruz. Bu zübükler heryerde var, biz zübükler nerde varsak, onlar da orada...
Aziz Nesin
The best fiction is true.
Kinky Friedman