You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
Fred Allen
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Fred Allen quotes
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 p.m. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.
A vice president in an advertising agency is a "molehill man" who has until 5 PM to make a molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished even before lunch.
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne - sounds like a trunk falling down a flight of stairs.
California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.
Committee - a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.
Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for a star.
I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal labotomy.
I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
The last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
When a radio comedian's program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesteryear's happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
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