Bennett Cerf Quotes

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -and if so, why?

I can’t say this too often—that a little humor can make life worth living. That has always been my credo. Somebody once asked me, “What would you like your epitaph to be?” I’ve always said that I’d like it to be: “He left people a little happier than they were when he came into the room.

The Cat in the Hat was so successful for Random House that Bennett Cerf decided to raise the stakes. He bet Dr. Seuss fifty dollars that Seuss couldn’t pull off the feat again using only fifty words. This time the list contained “ham,” “am,” and “Sam.” And this time it took Dr. Seuss just five months to write Green Eggs and Ham.

When people are decent, things work out for everybody,” my father instructs us. “That’s been my theory all through life. If you’re making money, let the other fellow make it, too.… If you can work a thing out so that everybody profits, that’s the ideal business.

Everybody was being decent, and when people are decent, thing work out for everybody. That has been my theory all through life. If you’re making money, let the other fellow make it too. If somebody’s getting hurt, it’s bad, but if you can work a thing out so that everybody profits that’s the ideal business.

Green Eggs and Ham. The book was not actually written to encourage fussy eaters to eat, but to make Seuss’s editor Bennett Cerf eat his words. (Cerf had bet Seuss he couldn’t write a book using fifty words or less.) Green Eggs and Ham hit it on the nail, and Geisel won fifty dollars, or would have, but Cerf never paid.

fucking mask, at least for about five seconds, before he ripped it off after some little dick in the crowd outside the hotel had called out, “Hey, Frankie Batman!” He’d rounded up a few acceptable people, like Leland and Pam Hayward, the Bennett Cerfs, Claudette Colbert, that classy old dame, and commandeered a table, handed a waiter a hundred bucks and asked for three

I don’t like getting old, but growing old happens to everybody, and you’ve got to be philosophical about it. I don’t fear death. I don’t believe in organized religion; I believe in being good. If there is a God, He’ll approve of your being a decent fellow.

Newsmen went after any man named in the diary. No stud was left unturned. The press even dug up Bennett Cerf, who had barely been mentioned. He laughed when told in what context his name appeared. “Well, well! So she broke that date with me to go out with George, did she? In the light of everything that’s happened since, it would appear a broken date made that one of the luckiest days of my life.” Lest anyone think he’d fallen on the wrong side of Mary’s love ledger, he added, “Our meetings were always casual, and we were never alone.