Scorn (22 page)

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
Groucho Marx

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde

What a tiresome affected sod.
Noël Coward on Oscar Wilde

Busy yourselves with that, you damned walruses, while the rest of us proceed with the play.
John Barrymore, throwing a fish into the stalls of a coughing audience

I would just like to mention Robert Houdini who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing bird-cage trick and the theatre matinee. May he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
Orson Welles, addressing the audience at the end of a matinee performance

I've seen more excitement at the opening of an umbrella.
Earl Wilson, reviewing a play

If you love
The War of the Worlds
then crank up the volume at home. Don't waste your money on this.
Ann Treneman on a 2016 production of
The War of the Worlds

The touring production of
Five Guys Named Moe
… performed a bluesey, doleful number with so little feeling that I suspect the only cotton their ancestors ever picked was out of an Anadin bottle.
Victor Lewis-Smith, newspaper critic, 1994

There was laughter at the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.
George S. Kaufman on a Broadway comedy

Darling, they've absolutely ruined your perfectly dreadful play.
Tallulah Bankhead to Tennessee Williams after seeing the film version of
Orpheus Descending,
entitled
The Fugitive Kind

There is enough Irish comedy to make us wish Cromwell had done a more thorough job.
James Agee on
Fort Apache

A film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire risk.
Peter Bradshaw on
Grace of Monaco

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
Roger Ebert on
North

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not just to climaxes but to prefixes.
Roger Ebert on the end of
The Village

No.
Leonard Maltin's complete review of
Isn't It Romantic?

Very well then: I say Never.
George Jean Nathan on
Tonight or Never

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Rick Polito's synopsis of
The Wizard of Oz

There were no wolves in the movie.
Amazon user Joe Watson on
The Wolf of Wall Street

Too many monsters.
Amazon user Joe A. Gonzales on
Monsters, Inc.

My friend Carl told me to watch this. Carl is no longer my friend.
Amazon user M.W. Malone on
The Expendables 2

I don't know what's happening. I bought this movie to have something happened.
Amazon user Eric Majewski on
The Happening

How many times must Willy be freed before he's freed?
Amazon user pauljolly65 on
Free Willy: Escape from Pirate's Cove,
the fourth film in the series.

Hunger isn't a game.
Amazon user Ryan Galaska on
The Hunger Games

If Peter O'Toole was any prettier they'd have to call it Florence of Arabia.
Noël Coward on O'Toole's T.E. Lawrence in the film
Lawrence of Arabia

As synthetic and padded as the transvestite's cleavage.
Frank Rich, ‘The Butcher of Broadway', on
La Cage aux Folles,
in the
New York Times

It is not true that Andrew Lloyd Webber and I are no longer speaking to each other. I saw his last show. At least I hope it was his last show.
Sir Tim Rice

There is less in this than meets the eye.
Tallulah Bankhead on the revival of a play by Maurice Maeterlinck

It can probably be said that Pinter raised to a new level of acceptability the kind of play in which the audience not only has no precise idea of what is going on, but seriously doubts whether the author has, either.
Kenneth Hurren on
The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter, in the
Mail on Sunday

A theatrical whore of the first quality.
Peter Hall on Bertolt Brecht

Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and, thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out.
Frances Trollope on William Shakespeare

Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.
Leo Tolstoy on William Shakespeare

One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare undoubtedly wanted taste.
Horace Walpole on William Shakespeare

This enormous dunghill.
Voltaire on William Shakespeare

We can say of Shakespeare that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
T.S. Eliot on William Shakespeare

Pale, marmoreal Eliot was there last week, like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head.
Virginia Woolf on T.S. Eliot

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin on William Shakespeare

A sycophant, a flatterer, a breaker of marriage vows, a whining and inconstant person.
Elizabeth Forsyth on William Shakespeare

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.
Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.
Samuel Johnson on William Shakespeare

A strange, horrible business, but I suppose good enough for Shakespeare's day.
Queen Victoria giving her opinion of
King Lear

When I read Shakespeare
I am struck with wonder
that such trivial people
should muse and thunder
in such lovely language.
D.H. Lawrence

The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.
George Bernard Shaw on William Shakespeare,
Dramatic Opinions and Essays

George too Shaw to be good.
Dylan Thomas on George Bernard Shaw

The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.
Israel Zangwill on George Bernard Shaw

He is an old bore; even the grave yawns for him.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree on Israel Zangwill

He is the true Elizabethan blank-verse beast, itching to frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he does not himself believe, and wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sedentary cowardice, and starvation of the sympathetic centres. It is not surprising to learn that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl: what would be utterly unbelievable would be his having succeeded in stabbing anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw on Christopher Marlowe,
Dramatic Opinions and Essays

The first man to have cut a swathe through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.
Frank Harris on George Bernard Shaw

Dramatized stench.
A review of George Bernard Shaw's
Mrs Warren's Profession

He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.
Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw

Oscar Wilde's talent seems to me to be essentially rootless, something growing in a glass on a little water.
George Moore, novelist

He was over-dressed, pompous, snobbish, sentimental and vain. But he had an undeniable flair for the possibilities of commercial theatre.
Evelyn Waugh on Oscar Wilde

I really enjoy only his stage directions … He uses the English language like a truncheon.
Max Beerbohm on George Bernard Shaw

Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.
G.K. Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw

He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant.
John Osborne on George Bernard Shaw in the
Manchester Guardian

There are no human beings in
Major Barbara
; only animated points of view.
William Archer on
Major Barbara
by George Bernard Shaw,
World

More than once, I found myself asking: ‘Is this homage or just horseshit?' In many instances I couldn't decide, concluding that it must be both. Surely no one makes a movie this bad by accident?
Mark Kermode on
Grace of Monaco

 

Doctors and Psychologists

It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was ‘past keeping the pigs'.
Florence Nightingale

If they do no other good they do at least this, that they prepare their patients early for death, undermining little by little and cutting off their enjoyment of life.
Michel de Montaigne on physicans who prescribe diets

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire

Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.
William Shakespeare,
Macbeth

I find medicine is the best of all trades because whether you do any good or not you still get your money.
Molière

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.
Anton Chekhov,
The Cherry Orchard

Despite all our toils and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht

Nobody can read Freud without realizing he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert M. Hutchins on Sigmund Freud

Anyone who pays to see a psychiatrist needs their head looking at.
Woody Allen

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams

Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, male or
female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement – they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.
Florence Nightingale

If the human brain were simple enough to understand we'd be too simple to understand it.
Emerson Pugh

I've frequently observed that people who believe in a sixth sense are usually deficient in the other five.
Victor Lewis-Smith

A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis.
Nora Ephron

He was meddling too much in my private life.
Tennessee Williams on why he had given up visiting his psychoanalyst

Actually I loathed the Viennese quack.
Vladimir Nabokov on Sigmund Freud

I'm a fucking doctor.
R.D. Laing's last reported words after suffering a heart attack in public. As people gathered round the spot someone said ‘Get a doctor.'

 

Law and Lawyers

The first thing we do, let's kill all lawyers.
William Shakespeare,
Henry VI, part 2

Ninety-nine per cent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
Steven Wright

This is a British murder inquiry and some degree of justice must be seen to be more or less done.
Tom Stoppard,
Jumpers

The basic test of a decent police force is that it should catch more criminals than it employs.
Robert Mark, ex-Police Commissioner

The majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor people alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France,
The Red Lily

The law-courts of England are open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel.
Charles, Lord Darling

Laws are like sausages: if you like them, don't watch them being made.
Otto von Bismarck

The scandalous part of most scandals is often not the lawbreaking but the law itself.
Michael Kinsley

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.
Charles Dickens

A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.
Jean Kerr

Lawyers, not poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
Columnist Simon Carr

I have come to regard the law-courts not as a cathedral but rather as a casino.
Richard Ingrams, in the
Guardian

A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Maxwell

Laws are like spiders' webs: if some poor weak creature comes up against them it is caught; but a bigger one can break through and get away.
Solon, an Athenian statesman

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
Sydney Smith

I do not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but I believe the gentleman is an attorney.
Samuel Johnson

A qadi [judge] who, when two parties part in peace,
Rekindles their dispute with binding words.
Indifferent to this world and its luxuries, he seems,
But in secret, he wouldn't say no to camel dung.
Oh, people, pause and hark
To the charming qualities of our qadi,
A homosexual, drunkard, fornicator, and takes bribes,
A tell-tale liar whose judgements follow his whims.
Ibn Ayas on Ibn al-Naqib, the Egyptian Chief Justice, Mameluke era (1250–1517)

My definition of utter waste is a coachload of lawyers going over a cliff, with three empty seats.
Lamar Hunt on the increasing problems of litigation in the American National Football League

PRISONER (in the dock after being sentenced to be hanged): My Lord, spare me: I am a product of my upbringing.
JUDGE: So am I! Send him down.

YOUNG BARRISTER: My lord, my unfortunate client … my lord, my unfortunate client … my lord, my … my …
LORD ELLENBOROUGH: Go on, sir, go on. As far as you have proceeded hitherto, the court is entirely in agreement with you.
Lord Ellenborough

JUDGE: Counselor, are you trying to show contempt for this court?
LAWYER: No, your Honour, I'm trying to conceal it.

Possibly not, m'Lud, but you are much better informed.
F.E. Smith to a judge who failed to understand one of the barrister's legal speeches. The judge had told Smith: ‘I have listened to you, Mr Smith, but I am none the wiser.'

He lied like an eye-witness.
Russian proverb

George Jeffreys pointed his stick at one of the rebels hauled
before him in the famous ‘bloody assizes' saying: ‘There is a rogue at the end of my cane.' ‘At which end. My Lord?' retorted the man.
Anonymous

LORD SANDWICH: You will die either on the gallows, or of the pox.
WILKES: That must depend on whether I embrace your lordship's principles or your mistress.
John Wilkes; sometimes attributed to Samuel Foote

I have forgotten more law than you ever knew, but allow me to say, I have not forgotten much.
Judge John Maynard, replying to Judge Jeffrey's assertion that he was so old he had forgotten the law

I can't take my chauffeur everywhere.
Derek Laud, Conservative candidate, explaining a drink-driving charge

CONVICTED CRIMINAL: As God is my judge – I am innocent.
MR JUSTICE BIRKETT: He isn't; I am, and you're not!
Sir Norman Birkett

[It is reported that] after a ten year stand off, Lord Longford is again visiting the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Thank goodness, a nation will sleep more soundly for knowing that, at last, this revolting psychopath is being properly punished.
Simon Heffer

The difference is that we Europeans accept we've all got to die of something or other. Americans think death is a calamity for which you can sue somebody.
Jonathan Miller

From every treetop some wild woods songster will carol his mating song, butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happy as it pursues its accustomed vocation. The gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, will be glad but you. You won't be here to enjoy it because I command the sheriff or some other officer of this country to lead you out to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from the knotting bough of a sturdy oak, and let you hang until you are dead. And then, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officer or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse, that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, copper-coloured, blood-thirsty, throat-cutting, chilli-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son-of-a-bitch.
Transcript from US District Court, New Mexico Territory, 1881, USA v. Gonzales

You are a low-down, depraved son-of-a-bitch. There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them.
US trial judge sentencing Alferd [sic] Packer for cannibalism, 1874

Here comes counsel for the other side.
Sydney Smith as the lawyer Lord Brougham arrived at a performance of
The Messiah