The Book of Great Funny One-Liners (5 page)

Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.

American critic Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

A provincial Debussy.

British historian A. J. P Taylor on Frederick Delius

Some people exist who like to see their names in print. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are print junkies.

Germaine Greer, Australian feminist

Rachmaninov’s immortalising totality was his scowl. He was a six and a half foot scowl.

Igor Stravinsky on fellow Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov

The musical equivalent of blancmange.

Journalist Bernard Levin on the work of fellow Brit, the composer Frederick Delius

Spinning Wheel,
by Blood, Sweat and Tears, is music to commit voluntary euthanasia by.

Simon Hoggart, British journalist

The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

Schoenberg would be better off shovelling snow.

German composer Richard Strauss on Austrian-Hungarian composer Arnold Schoenberg

I’ve always said that there’s a place for the press but they haven’t dug it yet.

Tommy Docherty, Scottish footballer

Mr Robin Day asks me to vouch for the fact that he can sing. I testify that the noise he makes is in fact something between that of a cat drowning, a lavatory flushing and a hyena devouring her after birth in the Appalachian Mountains under a full moon.

British writer Auberon Waugh on the British political broadcaster

The approach of Frankie Lane to the microphone is that of an accused man pleading with a hostile jury.

Kenneth Tynan, British writer

After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?

German composer Richard Wagner on Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini

Madam, I have cried only twice in my life; once when I dropped a wing of truffled chicken into Lake Como, and once for the first time I heard you sing.

Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer

He is to piano playing as David Soul is to acting; he makes Jacques Loussier sound like Bach; he reminds us how cheap potent music can be.

Welsh conductor Richard Williams on French pianist Richard Clayderman

With regard to Gounod’s
Redemption,
if you will only take the precaution to go in long enough after it commences and to come out long enough before it is over, you will not find it wearisome.

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived but most of them wish they were the only one alive and quite a few fondly believe their wish has been granted.

W.H. Auden, British writer

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan, British politician

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

Roy Blount, American writer

Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.

British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle

Sitting in a sewer and adding to it.

Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle describing the poetry of Algernon Swinburne.

He not only overfilled with learning but stood in the slop.

Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle on British writer Thomas Babington Macaulay

I did so enjoy your book, darling. Everything that everybody writes in it is so good.

Mrs Patrick Campbell, British actor

Standing up to his neck in a cesspool and adding to its contents.

American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne

… with brass knobs on a gap-toothed and hoary ape, carried at first notice on the shoulder of Carlyle … who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on.

Algernon Swinburne on both Emerson and Carlyle

For those of us without the dubious benefit of a classical education autocoprophagous means eating your own shit.

Scottish writer and essayist Thomas Carlyle

He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

British clergyman Sydney Smith on Thomas Babington Macaulay

Isn’t it a shame that Maxwell Anderson’s poetic licence has expired.

Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.

Thomas Babington Macaulay on British writer John Dryden

Warren Harding, the only man, or woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors, is dead.

e.e. cummings, American poet

I do not hate the critics. I have nothing but compassion for them. How can I hate the crippled, the mentally deficient and the dead?

Albert Finney, British actor

Critics are just eunuchs at a gangbang.

George Burns, American comedian

A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

William Faulkner on fellow American writer Mark Twain

Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste: then killed it.

Ford Madox Ford on fellow British writer Joseph Conrad

Addison was responsible for many of the evils from which English prose has since suffered. He made prose artful and whimsical, he made it sonorous when sonority was not needed, affected when it did not require affectation... He was the first Man of Letters. Addison had the misuse of an extensive vocabulary and so was able to invalidate a great number of words and expressions; the quality of his mind was inferior to the language which he used to express it.

British critic Cyril Connolly on British statesman and essayist Joseph Addison

If you cannot get a job as a pianist in a brothel, you become a royal reporter.

Max Hastings, British journalist

Dear Randolph, utterly unspoilt by failure.

Noel Coward on Winston’s son, writer Randolph Churchill

A triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and remove it.

Evelyn Waugh on fellow British writer Randolph Churchill

Jackie Collins is to writing what her sister Joan is to acting.

Campbell Grison, critic

Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.

Ernest Hemingway, American writer

The essence of humour is surprise; that is why you laugh when you see a joke in
Punch.

A.P. Herbert, British humorist

The Sun
and
Mirror
have become the standard bearers of illiteracy.

Welsh novelist Emyr Humphreys on the British tabloids.

Barbara Cartland’s eyes were twin miracles of mascara and looked like two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

Clive James, Australian writer

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

Lyndon B. Johnson, American president

Indeed, the freedom with which Dr Johnson condemns whatever he disapproves is astonishing.

Jane Welsh Carlyle, the ‘Great Victorian Wife’ of Thomas Carlyle

A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books and decreases the number of women.

Alphonse Kerr, Canadian politician

The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.

Rosamond Lehmann on fellow British novelist Ian Fleming

Drama critics are there to show gay actors what it is like to have a wife.

Hugh Leonard, Irish dramatist

Chuang Tzu was born in the fourth century
BC.
The publication of this book in English, over two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature.

Bernard Levin, British journalist

He is like someone on a quiz show who insists on giving answers in greater detail than is actually necessary.

Journalist William Leith on fellow Brit, the writer and composer Anthony Burgess

Anyone making love to Germaine Greer should have his guide dog confiscated and be awarded the Victoria Cross.

Bernard Manning, British comedian

His very frankness is falsity. In fact, it seems falser than his insincerity.

New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield on her husband John Middleton Murry

Before they made S.J. Perlman, they broke the mould.

Groucho Marx, American actor and comedian

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Groucho Marx, American actor and comedian

The triumph of sugar over diabetes.

American drama critic George Jean Nathan on the works of British writer J.M. Barrie

The conscientious Canadian critic is one who subscribes to the
New York Times
so that he knows at first hand what his opinions should be.

Eric Nichol, Canadian critic

A hyena that wrote poetry in tombs.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri

Kingsley Amis once said that sex was a great cure for a hangover, which indeed must be the case, because if you thought Kingsley Amis was about to make love to you, you’d certainly avoid getting drunk in the first place.

Joseph O’Connor on his fellow British writer

Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

Mark Twain, American writer

One of the surest signs of Conrad’s genius is that women dislike his works.

George Orwell on his fellow British writer

A huge pendulum attached to a small clock.

Russian critic Ivan Panin on British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Take an idiot from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman, and the fourth generation of the connection should be a good publisher from an American point of view.

Mark Twain, American writer

Hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil—you’ll never get a job working for a tabloid.

Phil Pastoret, British journalist

I would praise Joad’s new book, but modesty forbids.

Bertrand Russell on fellow British philosopher C.E.M. Joad

Only a flaw of nature prevented Vita Sackville-West from being one of nature’s gentlemen.

Edith Sitwell, British poet

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.

American critic Alexander Woollcott on the French writer

I do not think that Rousseau’s poem
Ode to Posterity
will reach its destination.

Voltaire on his fellow French writer

Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story. As an artist he is everything except articulate.

Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit on British novelist George Meredith

There are two ways of disliking poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope.

Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist, but seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Humbert Woolf, British writer

I believe that I could write like Shakespeare, if I had a mind to try it.

William Wordsworth, British poet

Time is the only critic without ambition.

John Steinbeck, American writer