Tag Archives: humor

The Devil’s Dictionary: Inhumanity

Posted on May 1, 2018 | 1 comment

“Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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Rotten Rejections: Jacqueline Susann and Valley of the Dolls

Posted on April 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

“She is painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene calls for the hand of a pro. She wastes endless pages on utter trivia, writes wide-eyed romantic scenes that would not make the back pages of True Confessions, hauls out every terrible show biz cliché in all the books, lets every good scene fall apart in endless talk and allows her book to ramble aimlessly…most of the first 200 pages are virtually worthless and dreadfully dull and practically every scene is dragged out and stomped on by her endless talk….”

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Platitude

Posted on April 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Platitude, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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Oscar Wilde on Skepticism

Posted on April 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

“To believe is very dull. To doubt intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.”

Oscar Wilde

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Clergyman

Posted on April 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Posted on March 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

[Whenever I feel down, I turn to the the Algonquin Wits, and especially one of its most brilliant, albeit self-destructive, members, the late, great Dorothy Parker. I want to annotate this quote with something few people know about Mrs. Parker: she was a dedicated civil rights activist who greatly respected Martin Luther King, Jr.; indeed, she she left her estate in its entirety to him.]

“American writer of short stories, verse, and criticism. Parker was noted for her caustic wit, as a drama critic for Vanity Fair and later a book reviewer for The New Yorker, and she became one of the luminaries of the Algonquin Round Table. Her works in verse are equally sardonic, usually dry, elegant commentaries on departing or departed love. The collection Enough Rope (1926), contains the much quoted ‘Resume’ on suicide, and ‘News Item,’ about women who wear glasses. Her short stories, which were collected in After Such Pleasures (1932) and Here Lies (1939), are as imbued with a knowledge of human nature as they are deep in disenchantment; among the best known are ‘A Big Blonde’ and ‘A Telephone Call.’”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Mrs. Parker on Autobiographical Veracity

Posted on March 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

“It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson’s] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.”

Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker 25 Feb. 1928

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Bette Midler on the Timeline of Culture

Posted on March 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

“When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.”

Quoted in Jerusalem Post, 24 February 1989

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Helen Mirren on “Acting”

Posted on March 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

[Of nudity] “The part never calls for it. And I’ve never used that excuse. The box office calls for it.”

Quoted in Independent (London) 22 March 1994

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Dorothy Parker, Famously, on Contemporary Fiction

Posted on March 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

[In book review] “This is not a book that should be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Quoted in The Algonquin Wits, ed. Robert E. Drennan (1968)

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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