Alexander Woollcott Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day.

Alexander Woollcott
At 83 [George Bernard] Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's.

Alexander Woollcott
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

Alexander Woollcott
The two oldest professions in the world — ruined by amateurs.
On actors and prostitutes

Alexander Woollcott
Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune.

Alexander Woollcott
She is so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth. It is not so much the familiar phenomenon of a hand of steel in a velvet glove as a lacy sleeve with a bottle of vitriol concealed in its folds.
Of Dorothy Parker

Alexander Woollcott
I think your slogan 'Liberty or Death' is splendid, and whichever one you decide on will be all right with me.

Alexander Woollcott
Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

Alexander Woollcott
I have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.

Alexander Woollcott
I've never had the impertinence to be sorry for Helen Keller. I'd as soon be sorry for Niagara Falls. But now as I bring the story up to date, I'm shriveled with shame when I recall that at times in my life — my easy life — I've actually been sorry for myself. You too? We've got our nerve, haven't we?

Alexander Woollcott
This... is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

Alexander Woollcott
I count it a high honor to belong to a trade in which the good men write each piece, each paragraph, each sentence, as lovingly as any Addison, and do so in the full knowledge that by noon the next day it will have been used to light a fire or saved, if at all, to line a shelf.

Alexander Woollcott
Once in pre-war days, when curiously-bonneted women drivers were familiar sights at the taxi-wheels, I cried out to one in my dismay: "Is there no speed limit in this mad city?"
"Oh, yes, monsieur," she answered sweetly over her shoulder, "but no one has ever succeeded in reaching it."

Alexander Woollcott
It has been said that she died in harness. That expression of a plodder overtaken by death is inadequate for so gallant, so defiantly twinkling an exit. She was a boat that went to the bottom with its orchestra playing gaily.

Alexander Woollcott
I have no need of your God-damned sympathy. I only wish to be entertained by some of your grosser reminiscences.

Alexander Woollcott
It was Mrs. Campbell, for instance, who, on a celebrated occasion, threw her companion into a flurry by describing her recent marriage as "the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue."

Alexander Woollcott