198 Quotes by Robert Benchley

If you think that you have caught a cold, call in a good doctor. Call in three good doctors and play bridge.

Then it's merrily, merrily, merrily, whoa! To the old gray church they come and go, Some to be married and some to be buried And Old Robin has gone for the mail

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

A man gets on a train with his little boy, and gives the conductor only one ticket. 'How old's your kid?' the conductor says, and the father says, 'He's four years old.' 'He looks at least twelve to me,' says the conductor. And the father says, 'Can I help it if he worries?

A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is 'Don't you wish you knew?

My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do not play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.

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

The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.

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.