W C Field Quotes

Philadelphia, wonderful town, spent a week there one night ~ W.C. Fields

Advertisers as well as political leaders long ago found that it is easier to appeal to the people through the heart than through the mind. Programs built with an emotional people are sure to draw the largest audiences and the biggest response. Workers in the field of educational radio are loath to acknowledge this truism, maintaining that certain programs must be built to appeal to the intellect. Of course, they are right, but that is the minority appeal. ~ Judith C. Waller

The first thing I did with the prize money was to buy a paddy field for Apa. He would no longer be a landless farmer in an agricultural society. ~ M.C. Mary Kom

It is funnier to bend things than to break them. ~ W.C. Fields

I have been in the entertainment business some forty-three years, and I have never said anything detrimental or anything that might be construed as belittling any race or religion. I would be a sucker to do so because you can't insult the customers. ~ W.C. Fields

The last jobs I had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access TV station. As in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself. ~ Louis C.K.

Alcoholic: anybody who drinks more than I do. ~ W.C. Fields

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. ~ W.C. Fields

The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with baited breath. ~ W.C. Fields

As the wit W. C. Fields advised: 'If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There is no point making a fool of yourself.'
This advice is easy to give and difficult to put into practice, but as you build your strengths, sometimes making great progress, sometimes slipping back, take comfort from the fact that this is how a strong life is supposed to be lived. ~ Donald O. Clifton

I only drink to steady my nerves ... sometimes I'm so steady I don't move for months. ~ W.C. Fields

Children should neither be seen nor heard from – ever again. ~ W.C. Fields

Beds are dangerous. More people die in bed than anywhere else. ~ W.C. Fields

Wouldn't it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol. ~ W.C. Fields

I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted. ~ W.C. Fields

Anxiety leads to a narrowing of the field of attention, the so-called tunnel vision, and when people are anxious, they are unable to attend to the total situation as is necessary to enable them to act rationally, but impulsively do the first thing that comes into their heads which is usually determined by what others are doing at the same time. ~ James A.C. Brown

To write good religious science fiction, or indeed good religious fiction of any kind, is a challenge but one that it would be worthwhile trying to meet. It seems a pity the field has been apparently abandoned to pernicious rubbish like 'The Da Vinci Code', though this seems already, mercifully, to have faded away. In this, as in other areas, we could do with another C. S. Lewis to re-state the principles of Christianity in terms to stir the imagination. ~ Hal G.P. Colebatch

I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get. ~ W.C. Fields

When doctors and undertakers meet, they wink at each other. ~ W.C. Fields

When asked to borrow money: I'll see what my lawyer says ... And if he says yes, I'll get another lawyer. ~ W.C. Fields

I know of only six genuine comic geniuses in movie history; Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx & Harpo Marx, Peter Sellers, and W.C. Fields. ~ Woody Allen

I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned. I was overwhelmed by the endless infertility of this desert. Even if something could have thrived there, the creative power of desire was still absent. Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil's own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and hour your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit. ~ C. G. Jung

I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes. ~ W.C. Fields

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. ~ W.C. Fields

I didn't say the meat was tough. I said I didn't see the horse that is usually outside. ~ W.C. Fields

Floating in the tank after a busy day's work brings a great relief. Suddenly all of the stimulation of holding one upright against gravity disappears. One realizes that a good deal of the fatigue accumulated during the day is caused by keeping one's body upright in a gravitational field. From a neurophysiological standpoint, one has immediately freed up very large masses of neurons from the necessity of constant computations (as to the direction of gravity, the programming by visual and acoustic inputs, by temperature changes, etcetera). For example, one's cerebellum is now freed for uses other than balancing the body. In summary, then, ~ John C. Lilly

I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope. ~ C. G. Jung

The National Debt is a very Good Thing and it would be dangerous to pay it off for fear of Political Economy. ~ W.C. Sellar

Hollywood is the gold cap on a tooth that should have been pulled out years ago. ~ W.C. Fields

Reality is an illusion that occurs due to the lack of alcohol. ~ W.C. Fields

I could be stranded in any town in the United States with ten cents and within an hour make $20 with the shell game. ~ W.C. Fields

My dead and wounded were nearly as great in number as those still on duty. They literally covered the ground. The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks; the ground was soaked with the blood of as brave men as ever fell on the red field of battle. ~ William C. Oates

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:

ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz,
Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts.

LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short.

SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome ~ Irving Howe

I won't lie. Looking back is difficult - my memories are tinged with hollowness and shame. Still, I wasn't suicidal. I mean, sure. This last time, I did drink the poison - and maybe this sounds weird, but it just never occurred to me that I would really die from it. And I didn't. Not technically. But psychiatry, like alchemy, is a very inexact science. You'd think psychiatrists of all people would have a sense of humor about an occasional lapse in judgment like taking a few drops of poison. They don't. (Having just reread this note, I'm fairly certain the words are not exactly coming out the ~ W.C. Anderson

I drink with impunity ... or anyone else who invites me. ~ W.C. Fields

If there's a will, prosperity can't be far behind. ~ W.C. Fields

N.B. – Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once. ~ W.C. Sellar

Prayers never bring anything ... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas ~ W.C. Fields

If you run 100 miles a week, you can eat anything you want - Why? Because (a) you'll burn all the calories you consume, (b) you deserve it, and (c) you'll be injured soon and back on a restricted diet anyway. ~ Don Kardong

Few things in life are more embarrassing than the necessity of having to inform an old friend that you have just got engaged to his fiancee. ~ W.C. Fields

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive). ~ W.C. Sellar

... ... but work in the field has nothing to do with dignity or with anything except patience, concentration, and eternal vigilance ~ C. William Beebe

I am a product [ ... of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. ~ C.S. Lewis

It's easy to get carried away in the search for "experience." I think that people boast of "experience" as if all experience is good. The whole world will tell you that all mistakes are good and all experiences are worthwhile. Nevertheless, I believe in an equilibrium. I always say "throw yourself out there" but at the same time, I want to tell you, that there are so many experiences in life that you're better off not experiencing. Experience is not always a positive thing, it can affect a person in such a way that it is like finding a tulip trampled under foot, run over by bicycles and spit on. And then the tulip is set on a windowsill for sale with a sign that says "I have had so much experience, that's why I'm more expensive." But the truth is, there's nothing wrong with being that tulip in the field, untouched and caressed by moonlight. Yes, we have the choice to make mistakes, but we also have the choice to choose what things we allow in to make marks upon our lives. It is okay to be untouched by darkness. ~ C. JoyBell C.

How well I remember my first encounter with The Devil'ss Brew. I happened to stumble across a case of bourbon - and went right on stumbling for several days thereafter. ~ W.C. Fields