Robert Benchley
Robert Benchley
Robert Charles Benchleywas an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from New York City and his peers at the Algonquin Round Table to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 September 1889
CityWorcester, MA
CountryUnited States of America
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 biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.
If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.
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 freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
Most of the arguments to which I am a party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.
I can't seem to bring myself to say, "Well, I guess I'll be toddling along." It isn't that I can't toddle. It's that I can't guess I'll toddle.
Perfectly Scandalous" was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly
There are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide everything into two and those who don't
There is something about saying "Ok" and hanging up the receiver with a bang that kids a man into feeling that he has just pulled off a big deal, even if he has only called the telephone company to find out the correct time
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.
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