Renata Adler Quotes

A pin has as much head as some authors and a good deal more point.

This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her 10 years to understand.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

The true touchstone of wit is the impromptu.

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.

Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things.

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools.

Like a frog, the aphorist waits for something to fly by that he can catch with his tongue.

After wisdom comes wit.

True wit has a grave intention.

Those who object to wit are envious of it.

A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.

Silence is the best substitute for brains ever invented.

True wit never made us laugh.

I call my lawyer and say, 'Can I ask you two questions?' He says, 'What's the second question?'

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.

A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don't think of it first.

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say 'Can I make up?' and he would say 'Oh yes - tinted?', or he would say, 'Oh yes - clotted?'

People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.

This rudeness is a sauce to his good wit, Which gives men stomach to digest his words With better appetite.

Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense