Robert Benchley Quotes

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.

So who's in a hurry?

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I think that the Younger Generation is up to something.... I base my apprehension on nothing more definite than the fact that they are always coming in and going out of the house, without any apparent reason.

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.

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.

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

There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.

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

Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists.

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

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.