A Little Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

I’m the female equivalent of a counterfeit $20 bill. Half of what you see is a pretty good reproduction, the rest is a fraud.

Cher 1946– American singer and actress

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

Cyril Connolly 1903–74 English writer

He’s so small, he’s the only man I know who has turn-ups on his underpants.

Jerry Dennis American writer

If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you’d form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

Charles Dickens 1812–70 English novelist

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

Isak Dinesen 1885–1962 Danish novelist and short-story writer

to William Cecil, who suffered from gout:

My lord, we make use of you, not for your bad legs, but for your good head.

Elizabeth I 1533–1603 English queen

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six.

Nora Ephron 1941–2012 American screenwriter

My body, on the move, resembles in sight and sound nothing so much as a bin-liner full of yoghurt.

Stephen Fry 1957– English comedian, actor, and writer

Mr Richards was a tall man with what must have been a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

Margaret Halsey 1910–97 American writer

[Alfred Hitchcock] thought of himself as looking like Cary Grant. That’s tough, to think of yourself one way and look another.

Tippi Hedren 1930– American actress

seaside postcard showing a very fat man whose stomach obscures the small boy at his feet:

Can’t see my little Willy.

Donald McGill 1875–1962 English cartoonist

If I see something sagging, dragging or bagging, I’m going to have the stuff tucked or plucked.

Dolly Parton 1946– American singer and songwriter

Cuddling up to a piece of gristle.

Guy Ritchie 1968– English film director, on Madonna

My body is so bad, a Peeping Tom looked in my window and pulled down the shade.

Joan Rivers 1933–2014 American comedienne

Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty.

William Shakespeare 1564–1616 English dramatist

Let’s forget the six feet and talk about the seven inches.

Mae West 1892–1980 American film actress

JACK LEMMON: Look how she moves! It’s like Jell-O on springs!

Billy Wilder 1906–2002 and I. A. L. Diamond 1915–88 American screenwriters, watching Marilyn Monroe, in the film Some Like It Hot

The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor.

P. G. Wodehouse 1881–1975 English-born writer

Books

see alsoDICTIONARIES, LIBRARIES, PUBLISHING, READING

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Ambrose Bierce 1842–c.1914 American writer

on Fanny Hill:

The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.

Brigid Brophy 1929–95 Irish novelist

on hearing that a fellow guest was ‘writing a book’:

Neither am I.

Peter Cook 1937–95 English comedian and actor

PETER BOGDANOVICH: I’m giving John Wayne a book as a birthday present.

JOHN FORD: He’s got a book.

John Ford 1895–1973 American film director

When the [Supreme] Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.

Robert H. Jackson 1892–1954 American lawyer

Book—what they make a movie out of for television.

Leonard Louis Levinson 1904–74

I opened it at page 96—the secret page on which I write my name to catch out borrowers and book-sharks.

Flann O’Brien 1911–66 Irish novelist and journalist

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Dorothy Parker 1893–1967 American critic and humorist

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.

Logan Pearsall Smith 1865–1946 American-born man of letters

No furniture so charming as books.

Sydney Smith 1771–1845 English clergyman and essayist

title of her bestseller on punctuation taken from a badly punctuated wildlife manual:

Eats, shoots and leaves.

Lynne Truss 1955– English writer

A thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Mark Twain 1835–1910 American writer

Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?

Keith Waterhouse 1929–2009 English writer