The Book of Great Funny One-Liners Read Online Free PDF Page A

had her dresses rejected by the Salvation Army.
    Phyllis Diller, American comedian
    Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.
    Coo Chanel on fellow French couturier Yves Saint Laurent
    I wouldn’t have that hanging in my home. It would be like living with a gas leak.
    Dame Edith Evans, British actor
    Another word from you, and I’ll paint you as you are!
    A frustrated German artist Max Leiberman to a sitter who wouldn’t shut up
    I am lonesome. They are all dying. I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.
    James McNeill Whistler, American painter
    The murals in restaurants are about on par with the food in art galleries.
    Peter de Vries, American editor
    The goitrous, torpid and squinting husks provided by Matisse in his sculpture are worthless except as tactful decorations for a mental home.
    Percy Wyndham-Lewis, Canadian-British painter
    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
    Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit
    Your right to wear a mint-green polyester leisure suit ends where it meets my eyes.
    Fran Leibowitz, American wit

Movers, Warblers
and Other Noise
Makers
    Far too noisy, my dear Mozart, far too many notes…
    Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
    For three hundred years flautists tried to play in tune. Then they gave up and invented vibrato.
    George Barrere, French flautist
    An ambulatory hamburger.
    Beast magazine’s description of US country and western singer Toby Keith
    When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.
    Victor Borge, Danish-American humorist and musician
    The world we live in is in a funny state. Someone goes out and shoots John Lennon and lets Des O’Connor live.
    Roy Brown, British comedian
    This man forgot how to sound or look natural thirty years ago.
    British journalist Dave Jennings on British singer Cliff Richard
    A glorified bandmaster.
    British composer Thomas Beecham on Italian composer Arturo Toscanini
    The true gentleman is a man who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t.
    British composer Thomas Beecham on fellow British composer Edward Elgar
    British conductor Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band master who stood against anything creative in the art of his time.
    John Fowles, British novelist
    Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
    James Stephens, critic
    Liszt’s bombast is bad; it is very bad; in fact there is only one thing worse in his music, and that is his affected and false simplicity. It was said of George Sand that she had a habit of speaking and writing concerning chastity in such terms that the very word became impure; so it is with the simplicity of Liszt.
    American critic Philip Hale on Hungarian composer Franz Liszt
    Perhaps it was because Nero played the fiddle, they burned Rome.
    Oliver Herford, American writer
    Modern music is just noise with attitude.
    Patrick Murray, British actor
    Liszt’s so-called piano music is nothing but Chopin and brandy.
    James Huneker, American music critic
    How could I possibly have a sexual relationship with a fifty-year-old fossil? I have a beautiful boyfriend of twenty-eight. Why should I swap for a dinosaur?
    Italian singer and model Carla Bruni on Mick Jagger. Bruni has nevertheless dated Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner and Donald Trump, and in 2008 married 53-year-old French president Nicolas Sarkozy
    This man has child-bearing lips.
    American comedian Joan Rivers on Mick Jagger
    I don’t understand anything about the ballet. All I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.
    Anton Chekov, Russian playwright
    Splitting the convulsively inflated larynx of the Muse, Berg utters tortured mistuned cackling, a pandemonium of chopped-up orchestral sounds, mishandled men’s throats, bestial outcries, bellowing, rattling, and all other evil noises… Berg is the poisoner of the well of German music.
    German review of Austrian composer Alban