Robert Benchley Quotes

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

Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall. … The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.

I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who … believe it to be the solution to most of this world’s problems.

So who's in a hurry?

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know.

A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child. The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.

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.

The only cure for a real hangover is death.