Robert Benchley Quotes

My dad was a big card player.

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

The biggest scandal I was ever involved in was - in high school, at a basketball game, I shot and scored for the other team.

You don't want to miss out on something and feel like an idiot.

If I'm playing cards for pennies, I want to win.

I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

Everyone's always waiting for someone to falter.

So, I'm thinking of a name for a villain that has a sense of humor. I thought of 'The Joker' as a name, and as soon as I thought that, I associate it with the playing card, as my family had a tradition of champion playing; my brother was a contract champion bridge player. There were always cards around the house.

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

I don't think I could live without a deck of cards in my hands.

I am terrible at cards.

It's hard to be so mentally competitive and when you're not competing you try to turn it off but it doesn't work like that. I don't think you can just turn it off, I think you still find ways to be competitive - if it's playing a video game, if it's playing cards.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

It's okay," he informs me. "Your grandfather is teaching me how to play poker." If I know Grandad, that means what he'll really be teaching Sam is how to cheat.

Everyone understands cards and relates to it. They have them in their homes and in their hands, so it makes them very accessible.

That's right, kid. Never play an ace if a two will do.

The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club. Once tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding.

Patience and shuffle the cards.

Hen nights should be banned. You're honour-bound to behave atrociously, then feel terribly ashamed afterwards. (This Charming Man)

I had never really been around cards.

There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

Poor Mr. Pickwick! ... If he played a wrong card, Miss Bolo looked a small armoury of daggers; if he stopped to consider which was the right one, Lady Snuphanuph would throw herself back in her chair, and smile with a mingled glance of impatience and pity to Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, at which Mrs. Colonel Wugsby would shrug up her shoulders, and cough, as much as to say she wondered whether he ever would begin.

I love to play bid whist as much as I love football.

As a child, I had a deck of Marvel top trumps. You can get top trumps with racing cars, or fighter planes, or football players... I had all of the Marvel superheroes and super-villains you could get, and I used to play them with my friends. They were all listed according to their height and weight and agility and their super-powers.

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.