Quotes by Irvin S. Cobb

“As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid.”

“Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.”

“A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.”

“If writers were good businessmen, theyd have too much sense to be writers.”

“You couldnt tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation.”

“Ive just learned about his illness. Lets hope its nothing trivial.”

“A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people havent.”

“A woman may have a witty tongue or a stinging pen but she will never laugh at her own individual shortcomings.”

“Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.”

“A sudden violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victims watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.”

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

“The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.”

“An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been discontinued.”

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless — a perfect part of a perfect tapestry.

Ive just learned about his illness lets hope its nothing trivial.

A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people havent.

If a woman likes another woman shes cordial. If she doesnt like her shes very cordial.

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid.