Fred Allen
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
When a radio comedian's program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesteryear's happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
The last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.