Fred Allen Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

He writes so well, he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

Fred Allen
The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.

Fred Allen
Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.

Fred Allen
Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

Fred Allen
It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn't have to face an issue.

Fred Allen
With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.

Fred Allen
Hush, little bright line, don't you cry You'll be a cliché by and by.

Fred Allen
A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

Fred Allen
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.

Fred Allen
An actor's success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

Fred Allen
To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with the skin wrapped around it.

Fred Allen
All the sincerity in Hollywood you could stuff in a flea's navel and still have room left to conceal eight caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

Fred Allen
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

Fred Allen
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.

Fred Allen
Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

Fred Allen
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.

Fred Allen
An advertising agency is eighty-five percent confusion and fifteen percent commission.

Fred Allen
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

Fred Allen
When you get through all the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you find the genuine tinsel underneath.

Fred Allen
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.

Fred Allen
California is a fine place to live—if you happen to be an orange.

Fred Allen
I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Fred Allen
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 even before lunch.

Fred Allen
English coffee tastes like water that has been squeezed out of a wet sleeve.

Fred Allen
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Fred Allen
California's a wonderful place to live - if you happen to be an orange.

Fred Allen
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Fred Allen
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.

Fred Allen
Committee—a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.

Fred Allen
A vice-president is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
Sometimes quoted as: The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

Fred Allen