Fred Allen Quotes
I'm going to Boston to see my doctor. He's a very sick man.
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.. [It is] radio fluoroscoped; the triumph of machinery over people; a "medium" because anything good on it is "rare."
The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
A kind of radio which lets people at home see what the studio audience is not laughing at.
He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on. (about Milton Berle)
He's so small, he's a waste of skin.
He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.
If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard - let him worry about cutting it.
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.
Radio in the 30's was a calm and tranquil medium. Oleaginous-voiced announcers smoothly purred their commercial copy into the microphones enunciating each lubricated syllable.
Crisis is a word used in advertising circles to refer to any incident to which the word "emergency" cannot be applied.
The president of the new agency had been a famous quarterback in college football an old wives tale told around the water cooler in the office related that, after he had left college when ever he met other players who had been on the team with him he could never recognize the fellow until he asked him to bend over.
The college quarterback started sending turtle-necked memos which intimated that, as the mink sayed as it backed into the electric fan, "the fur is going to fly".
A new headache tablet would be distributed to the staff and probably be very welcome. In the advertising game (it isn't buisness) a headache is an occupational side effect.
This man used to talk to himself incessantly. We called him the one-man conference.
This gentleman nursed two secret ambitions. The first was to put a day bed in his office so that he wouldn't have to sleep sitting up during conferences. His second and greater ambition was to keep changing elements we had in the program.
A conference (committe) is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.
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 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.
Where were you fellows when the paper was blank? [asking editors]
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.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Television is the triumph of machine over people.
California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for a star.
A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.
An actor's popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.
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.
Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
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.
Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.
A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
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 have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane 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 play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal labotomy.
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.
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.
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.
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?