Robert Benchley

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.

In a house where there are small children the bathroom soon takes on the appearance of the Old Curiosity Shop.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

Anyone who tries to keep track of what is happening in China is going to end up by wearing all the skin of his left ear from twirling around on it.

Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.

At fifteen one is first beginning to realize that everything isn't money and power in this world, and is casting about for joys that do not turn to dross in one's hands.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens.

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from.