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

junkies.
    Germaine Greer, Australian feminist
    Rachmaninov’s immortalising totality was his scowl. He was a six and a half foot scowl.
    Igor Stravinsky on fellow Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov
    The musical equivalent of blancmange.
    Journalist Bernard Levin on the work of fellow Brit, the composer Frederick Delius
    Spinning Wheel, by Blood, Sweat and Tears, is music to commit voluntary euthanasia by.
    Simon Hoggart, British journalist
    The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
    George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
    Schoenberg would be better off shovelling snow.
    German composer Richard Strauss on Austrian-Hungarian composer Arnold Schoenberg
    I’ve always said that there’s a place for the press but they haven’t dug it yet.
    Tommy Docherty, Scottish footballer
    This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant.
    Thomas B. Macaulay, British essayist
    Mr Robin Day asks me to vouch for the fact that he can sing. I testify that the noise he makes is in fact something between that of a cat drowning, a lavatory flushing and a hyena devouring her after birth in the Appalachian Mountains under a full moon.
    British writer Auberon Waugh on the British political broadcaster
    The approach of Frankie Lane to the microphone is that of an accused man pleading with a hostile jury.
    Kenneth Tynan, British writer
    After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?
    German composer Richard Wagner on Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini
    Madam, I have cried only twice in my life; once when I dropped a wing of truffled chicken into Lake Como, and once for the first time I heard you sing.
    Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer
    He is to piano playing as David Soul is to acting; he makes Jacques Loussier sound like Bach; he reminds us how cheap potent music can be.
    Welsh conductor Richard Williams on French pianist Richard Clayderman
    With regard to Gounod’s Redemption, if you will only take the precaution to go in long enough after it commences and to come out long enough before it is over, you will not find it wearisome.
    George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

Penners and Inkers
    No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived but most of them wish they were the only one alive and quite a few fondly believe their wish has been granted.
    W.H. Auden, British writer
    I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
    Aneurin Bevan, British politician
    Journalists are people who take in other people’s washing and then sell it.
    Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, Australian writing team
    Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
    Roy Blount, American writer
    Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.
    British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle
    Sitting in a sewer and adding to it.
    Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle describing the poetry of Algernon Swinburne.
    He not only overfilled with learning but stood in the slop.
    Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle on British writer Thomas Babington Macaulay
    I did so enjoy your book, darling. Everything that everybody writes in it is so good.
    Mrs Patrick Campbell, British actor
    Standing up to his neck in a cesspool and adding to its contents.
    American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne
    … with brass knobs on a gap-toothed and hoary ape, carried at first notice on the shoulder of Carlyle … who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on.
    Algernon Swinburne on both Emerson and Carlyle
    For those of us without the dubious benefit of a classical education autocoprophagous means eating your own shit.
    Scottish writer and essayist Thomas Carlyle
    Perhaps the saddest lot that can