Tracing Quotations
Tony Curtis? Fictional? Dear Quote Investigator: Tony Curtis was a wonderful actor, and I was saddened when he passed away in 2010. For years I have wondered about a quotation that he supposedly said. The story goes that he was asked what it was like to kiss Marilyn Monroe and he said: Kissing Marilyn was …
Continue reading “Kissing Marilyn Monroe is Like Kissing Hitler”
Groucho Marx? Walter Winchell? George S. Kaufman? George Jean Nathan? Dear Quote Investigator: When a friend asked me my opinion of a terrible play that I saw recently I answered: I did not like it, but perhaps this judgment is unfair. I saw it under adverse conditions — the curtain was up. Eventually she coaxed …
Continue reading “Theatrical Review: I Saw It Under Adverse Conditions. The Curtain Was Up”
Mark Twain? Grant Allen? Dear Quote Investigator: I am still in school and that is probably why the following quote attributed to Mark Twain appeals to me so much: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Your blog posts about Twain quotations reveal that the information on the internet about what he …
Continue reading “Never Let Schooling Interfere With Your Education”
Evan Esar? Jan Harold Brunvand? Bennett Cerf? Dear Quote Investigator: I was speaking with a friend about all the misinformation and misattributions in the world of quotations, and he said that he was familiar with this phenomenon of unreliability because he enjoys reading about urban-legends. He also gave his own quotation on this theme which …
Wilson Mizner? Steven Wright? Wallace Notestein? Ralph Foss? Joseph Cummings Chase? Asa George Baker? Leslie Henson? Tom Lehrer? Bob Oliver? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Some of the websites I come across seem to produce their content by using cut and paste. They do not even bother to collect information from multiple sources. I am reminded …
Dorothy Parker? Punch Humor Magazine? Sally’s Sallies Comic Strip? Ann Landers? Dear Quote Investigator: Previously you discussed a quote of Dorothy Parker’s which was self-critical, but she also directed her barbs at others. Here is an example [LWO]: When a garrulous old battle-ax was praised as “outspoken,” Mrs. Parker raised an eyebrow to take dead …
Continue reading ““Our host certainly is outspoken.” “Outspoken by whom?””
Mark Twain? James Montgomery Flagg? William Dean Howells? Dear Quote Investigator: When I discovered your blog I knew just the right word to describe it: Quotesmanship. That word was used in the New York Times in 1980 to describe the desire to determine and use correct attributions for quotations [NYQM]. The author of the Quotesmanship …
Alexander Woollcott? Karl Harriman? Marie Belloc-Lowndes? Nancy Vincent McClelland? Kenneth Herford? Dear Quote Investigator: I recently watched an excellent British film from the 1950s called “So Long at the Fair” and was fascinated by the plot [SLW] [SLI]. When I searched the net I discovered that I was not the only person intrigued by the …
Continue reading “Legend: The Vanishing Lady and the Vanishing Hotel Room”
Oscar Levant? Ed Gardner? Henry Morgan? Dear Quote Investigator: Every time I hear Hollywood referred to as Tinseltown it reminds me of the following quote: Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath. I have read this phrase in several places but was unsure who first created it. The …
Continue reading “Beneath the Phony Tinsel of Hollywood You’ll Find the Real Tinsel”
Benjamin Disraeli? Washington Irving? Dear Quote Investigator: Recently, I was reading the top-selling book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and encountered this sentence:[1] 2007, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Page 95, Random House, New York. (Verified with Amazon Look Inside) Nero did not …