Quotes
40 Funny Book Quotes That Actually Land
Funny quote lists have a failure mode: they're full of things that are pleasant rather than funny. A line that makes you exhale slightly through your nose has not earned a place on a page called funny book quotes.
So here's the standard we used — every line below either has a joke in it or a knife. Most of them are from writers who understood that comedy is a structural problem: you build a sentence that walks the reader confidently in one direction and then takes the floor away in the last three words. Wilde did it. Wodehouse did it better than anyone. Ambrose Bierce did it in a dictionary.
Wilde, Who Made It Look Effortless
Oscar Wilde's trick was inversion: take a piece of received wisdom, flip it, and deliver it as if it were the obvious thing anyone would say. It works because the flipped version is usually more honest than the original.
I can resist everything except temptation.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.
Twain, Who Could Not Help Himself
Twain's humour is the opposite of Wilde's — where Wilde is a dandy in a drawing room, Twain is a man leaning on a fence telling you something true and unflattering about the human race. The joke is almost always at our expense collectively, which is why it never feels mean.
“Classic.” A book which people praise and don't read.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Familiarity breeds contempt — and children.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Austen, Quietly Savage
People remember Austen as romantic and forget that she is the funniest novelist of her century. The mechanism is dramatic irony: her characters say things sincerely that the reader knows to be ridiculous, and Austen never once winks at you. Caroline Bingley's line about the joy of reading below is delivered while she is pretending to read in order to be noticed by a man who is actually reading — it's a joke about performative bookishness written in 1813.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!
You have delighted us long enough.
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Wodehouse, the Best Sentence-Builder of the Lot
If you only take one writer from this page, take Wodehouse. Nobody has ever constructed a comic sentence more precisely. “Far from being gruntled” is a joke that required inventing a word that didn't exist, and it lands so cleanly that most people assume it always did.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say “when.”
It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.
The Professional Cynics
Ambrose Bierce spent decades writing The Devil's Dictionary, a reference work in which every definition is a small act of violence against optimism. Saki and Jerome K. Jerome worked the same seam from opposite directions — Saki with cruelty, Jerome with the cheerful admission that he is lazy and so are you.
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Novel, n. A short story padded.
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
People Who Were Funnier Than Their Books
Dorothy Parker wrote good poems and better book reviews, and is remembered almost entirely for things she said at lunch. Her review of a novel — that it should be thrown rather than tossed aside — remains the most efficient pan in the history of criticism.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
The Moderns
Douglas Adams is the writer most often quoted badly — people repeat the punchlines and lose the setup, which is where the work is. The simile below about the ships and the bricks is a whole comic theory in one line: describe something by naming what it emphatically is not.
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Insane people are always sure that they are fine.
Where to Go Next If You Want More
The uncomfortable truth about funny quote lists is that they're a poor substitute for reading the funny book. Almost none of these lines are the best joke in their source — they're the ones that survive being removed from it, which is a different and lesser thing.
If you want the actual experience: Three Men in a Boat is free, public domain, and holds up better than most comedy written last year. The Importance of Being Earnest takes ninety minutes to read and is essentially a joke delivery system. And any Jeeves and Wooster novel will do — Wodehouse wrote roughly ninety books and the quality variance is remarkably small.
More Quotes and Reading Lists
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