Quotes from Fred Allen

Faces are all important. Without faces it would be impossible to identify our friends. If we had to recognize people by their bodies, we could only tell men from women. With career women, in many cases this would be impossible.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

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.

All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.

To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect weapon.

I'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.

"Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station."

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.

She used to be a schoolteacher but she has no class now.

My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get except the blinding headaches.