198 Quotes by Robert Benchley

I can't bring myself to say, 'Well, I guess I'll be toddling along.' It isn't that I can't toddle. It's just that I can't guess I'll toddle.

I never knew anyone yet who got up at six who did anything more useful between that time and breakfast than banging a tennis ballup against the side of the house, waiting for the more civilized members of the party to get up.

Who has not wished that his host would come out frankly at the beginning of the visit and state, in no uncertain terms, the rulesand preferences of the household in such matters as the breakfast hour? And who has not sounded out his guest to find out what he likes in the regulation of his diet and modus vivendi (mode of living)?

There seems to be a common strain of miserliness in the American people when it comes to throwing away toothpaste tubes which havea little left in the bottom.

The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.

I can remember the day when all that a professor was supposed to do was to mark "C minus" on students' examination papers, then gohome to tea. Nowadays they seem to feel that they must know just how much we (outside the university) eat, what we do with our spare time, and how we like our eggs.

I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!

For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. "I don't see how you stand it," they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.

If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.