Quotes About Wit

May I borrow a cup of cyanide?

Tongue; well that's a wery good thing when it an't a woman's.

The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there.

[T]he satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive. Swift destroyed the human race; Mark Twain and Thurber enabled it to go on. We human beings are all absurd variations of one another in any case, and this is what comedy of all kinds puts down on paper.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

When in doubt, tell a funny 'til you see what the other fellow is going to do.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

...for a writer humor is a rubber sword — it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

The kind of humor I like is the thing which makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.

To me, a comic says funny things. A humorist thinks funny things. But a humorist must not only think funny, he must listen funny... The best story tellers... are listeners and thinkers.

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams.

He who laughs last thinks slowest.

A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.

Now that is the way to write — peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.

And let me be rather but honest with no-wit, Than a noisy nonsensical half-witted poet.

A pun is a short quip followed by a long groan.

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg? — all the better.

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

I'm an incorrigible punster. Do not incorrige me.

For my own part, I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed; and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

The most original wits borrow from one another.

Sharp! yes, her tongue is like a new-set razor. She's quite original in her talk too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I heard her say about Craig—that he was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that's an Æsop's fable in a sentence.