Top 100 Benchley Quotes
#1. I was so lucky that I didn't have anyone to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style, I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work until I was around thirty.
Shel Silverstein
#2. Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.
Max Eastman
#3. Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.
Dorothy Parker
#4. Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
John Scalzi
#5. If Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had teamed up to write epic fantasy, something like Split Heirs might have resulted.
John DeChancie
#6. There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.
Robert Benchley
#7. The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.
Robert Benchley
#9. I don't trust a bank that would lend money to such a poor risk.
Robert Benchley
#10. Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.
Robert Benchley
#11. Every boy should have two things: a dog and a mother who lets him have one
Robert Benchley
#12. If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.
Peter Benchley
#13. If you take away the predators in the prairies and the national parks, you suddenly have an explosion of elk, and then you have a lack of the food source for the elk, so they strip all the ground bare and that takes away the cover, on and on and on and on. The whole food chain is disrupted.
Peter Benchley
#15. The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
Robert Benchley
#16. It is one of the most discouraging experiences I have ever had, not forgetting the time when I winked at the Queen Mother in London once.
Robert Benchley
#17. He would have lied to himself as facilely as an alcoholic lies to himself to justify the 10 a.m. tumbler of vodka : it may be early here, but in Baghdad it's almost evening.
Peter Benchley
#18. If you look at eggs, you will see that each one is almost round but not quite ... Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls.
Robert Benchley
#19. Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.
Robert Benchley
#20. The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
Robert Benchley
#21. Oceanography is a terrific career because gradually we seem to be coming around to realize that we had better become as acquainted with the seventy percent of our planet that is covered by water as we are with the dark side of the moon.
Peter Benchley
#22. The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.
Peter Benchley
#23. We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.
Peter Benchley
#24. I don't want to be an alarmist, but I think that the Younger Generation is up to something ... I base my apprehension on nothing more definite than the fact that they are always coming in and going out of the house, without any apparent reason.
Robert Benchley
#26. 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.
Robert Benchley
#27. You want to go easy on the suicide stuff - first thing you know, you'll ruin your health.
Robert Benchley
#28. Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
Robert Benchley
#29. He and I had an office so tiny, that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.
Dorothy Parker
#30. To fantasies', he said. 'Tell me about yours.' His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile.
Peter Benchley
#31. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.
Peter Benchley
#32. There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.
Robert Benchley
#33. The ideal age for a boy to own a dog is between forty-five and fifty.
Robert Benchley
#34. Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
Robert Benchley
#35. Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.
Robert Benchley
#37. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.
Robert Benchley
#38. Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.
Robert Benchley
#39. I hope that 'Jaws' will have brought sharks into the public interest at a time when we desperately need to reevaluate our care for the environment.
Peter Benchley
#40. Next to a shot of some good, habit-forming narcotic, there is nothing like travelling alone as a 'builder-upper.
Robert Benchley
#41. He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore.
Peter Benchley
#42. There was a minor burst of macho nuttiness after 'Jaws' came out, in which people would go off in shark tournaments and come back holding the bloody heads of these animals and say, 'Look what I did.' But they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years anyway.
Peter Benchley
#43. Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.
Peter Benchley
#44. Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
Robert Benchley
#45. What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.
Peter Benchley
#46. 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.
Robert Benchley
#47. odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high. He
Peter Benchley
#48. I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in "The Wild Duck," and I afterward had her killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.
Robert Benchley
#49. There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.
Robert Benchley
#50. It is rather to be chosen than great riches, unless I have omitted something from the quotation.
Robert Benchley
#51. I once heard of a murderer who propped his two victims up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime was discovered.
Robert Benchley
#52. You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.
Robert Benchley
#53. We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.
Robert Benchley
#54. We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.
Peter Benchley
#55. The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success.
Robert Benchley
#56. Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.
Robert Benchley
#57. I haven't been abroad in so long that I almost speak English without an accent now.
Robert Benchley
#58. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water ...
Peter Benchley
#59. The Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o'clock trying to get things into trunk and bags. This is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size.
Robert Benchley
#60. An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens.
Robert Benchley
#62. till he'd tried it. You have to understand. There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't know fear. He might be cautious -
Peter Benchley
#64. England and America should scrap cricket and baseball and come up with a new game that they both can play. Like baseball, for example.
Robert Benchley
#65. Because the Asian market is so omnivorous, it affects all the shark populations up and down the Central and South American coast, and to a certain extent the East Coast of the United States as well.
Peter Benchley
#66. The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn't willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.
Peter Benchley
#67. We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.
Robert Benchley
#68. For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
Robert Benchley
#69. The great fish moved silently through the night water.
Peter Benchley
#70. There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.
Peter Benchley
#71. New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.
Robert Benchley
#72. Sheer madness is, of course, the highest possible brow in humor.
Robert Benchley
#73. A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
#74. Who said time machines haven't been built yet? They already exist. They're called books
Robert Benchley
#75. I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
Robert Benchley
#76. Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.
Peter Benchley
#77. This is a test. It is only a test. Had it been an actual job, you would have received raises, promotions, and other signs of appreciation.
Robert Benchley
#78. Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.
Peter Benchley
#79. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.
Peter Benchley
#80. Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn't seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs. I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can't find it when I take the suit off.
Robert Benchley
#82. What was it? What could it
His last thought was surprise.
Peter Benchley
#84. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
Robert Benchley
#85. Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.
Robert Benchley
#86. People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but - " are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong.
Robert Benchley
#87. A quick, sharp laugh from Quint broke the thread of tension. "What a pair of
assholes," he said. "I seen that coming since you came aboard this morning.
Peter Benchley
#88. Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
Robert Benchley
#89. But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.
Robert Benchley
#90. 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.
Robert Benchley
#91. I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.
Peter Benchley
#92. The discovery of phobias by psychiatrists has done much to clear the atmosphere. Whereas in the old days a person would say: 'Let's get the heck out of here!' today she says: 'Let's get the heck out of here! I've got claustrophobia.
Robert Benchley
#93. The free-lance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley
#94. I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.
Peter Benchley
#95. God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.
Peter Benchley
#96. One of the chief duties of the fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him. This department of the game has been allowed to run down fearfully.
Robert Benchley
#97. 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?
Robert Benchley
#98. Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.
Robert Benchley
#99. I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.
Peter Benchley
#100. I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.
Peter Benchley
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