Groucho and Me Quotes

“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Any playwright who has been up against the agony of casting plays will tell you that the actor who can play comedy is the fellow to shoot for. The comic intuition gets to the heart of a human situation with a precision and a velocity unattainable in any other way. A great comic actor will do it for you with an inflection of voice as adroit as the flick of the wrist of a virtuoso fencer.” Nevertheless,”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho And Me

“If you swim, you usually do it with your family. You can play three sets of tennis in an hour. However, by playing eighteen holes of golf instead of nine, a husband can manage to remain away from home most of the day. And if he's one of the many duffers and hooks or slices a great deal, he can spend most of the day in the rough, where it's impossible for his wife to find him.
But staying away from home isn't all there is to golf. It's not even the most important part.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“On the stage I frequently stepped out of character and spoke directly to the audience. After the first day's shooting on Cocoanuts, the producer (who has since retired from the movies for the good of the industry) said, "Groucho, you can't step out of character and talk to the audience."
Like all people who are glued to tradition, he was wrong. I spoke to them in every picture I appeared in. (Sometimes they answered back. This I found rather disconcerting.) Nevertheless the movie industry went on just the same, turning out its share of good and bad pictures, and nobody seemed to care whether I stepped out of character.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“I don't want to mention any names, but some of my best and most talented friends died long before their time, thanks to prohibition. The amount of damage wreaked on this country by the blue noses who were responsible for this act can never be estimated. Prohibition created Al Capone, Dutch Schultz and hundreds of other "Little Caesars.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Despite the fact that I was a big hit on the stage, I was dissatisfied. I wanted to write. The fact that I hadn't graduated from grammar school scared me and held me back. Almost all the successful writers I knew had been to college. Some had even graduated, and I envied them. "What was an actor?" I thought. "Nothing! Just a mouthpiece for someone else's words. It's the writer who makes the actor good or bad."
I finally began landing little squibs in newspaper columns. Then I started writing longer articles. A few times I pinch-hit for Woollcott, Percy Hammond and others. Then I sold a few pieces to various magazines. An article I once wrote for Franklin P. Adams in the New York World was picked up by H. L. Mencken and reprinted in his book, The American Language. Nothing I ever did as an actor thrilled me more.
I liked being an actor, hearing the laughter and bowing to the applause. I still do, but my biggest kick has always been seeing something of mine in print.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Vaudeville, like everything else (well, nearly everything else), eventually disappeared. Movies came in and dealt vaudeville its first shattering blow. Then along came radio, and, of course, the thrust mortal was television.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“I know this may not seem terribly important, but it was all-important to us. It was actually our point of departure, our coming of age, our first timid step over that mysterious line that divides the small time from the big time. For the first time in our career we realized that we could succeed as an act without any outside help. We didn't need any more extraneous singers, dancers, and feeble comedians. We were now a unit. We were The Marx Brothers.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“The following year I was a year older”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Give or take a few years, I was born around the turn of the century. I won't say which century. Everyone is allowed one guess.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Each year the government is faced with the same problem-how to dispose of the corn surplus. They've tried everything: storing it on battleships, dumping it in silos (with the hope that the rats and squirrels will make away with some of it); they've even tried giving it away free to the moonshiners. But the White Mule business ain't what it used to be. The moonshiners now want potatoes because the American public has switched over to vodka. Well, the government's problem can be solved very easily. Just give me the corn my book so sorely needs.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“But if you’ve lived high on the hog for a few decades, the thought of spending your declining years sans all the wonderful things you had when you were in the chips can give you the horrors.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho And Me

“I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Gentlemen? If you continue to write nasty pieces about me, I shall be obliged to cancel my subscription.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“This isn’t a particularly novel observation, but the world is full of people who think they can manipulate the lives of others merely by getting a law passed. There are large groups in America who, if they could swing it, would prohibit the use of everything that they didn’t personally approve of—smoking, drinking, dancing, going to the movies, eating Italian salami and, if it could be regulated, even love.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“You must realize that not all insomniacs are afflicted with the same blights, and what cures one man is another man’s poison. What about the bed you are floundering around in? Do you use a soft mattress, an orthopedic one, or do you sleep on the springs like the Hindus? Many physicians recommend sleeping on the floor if you arrive home late at night half crocked or, in medical terms, “with a bun on.” I, on the other hand, advise you to forget the doctors, and advise you to sleep on the floor when sober. It has many things to recommend it. To begin with, you eliminate the cost of a bed. The money saved here can then be used for getting drunk again. Moreover, if you sleep on the floor there is no danger of falling—unless you happen to be sleeping near an open manhole.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Harpo, a shy and silent fellow, was taken up by the Algonquin crowd, at that time probably the most famous and brilliant conversational group in America. On a clear day, a good many of the following would be assembled there for lunch and mayhem: George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Dorothy Parker, Newman Levy, Robert Sherwood, Howard Dietz and many others.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Now that I had become a man (with a leaky fountain pen to prove it), I was ready to take on the world.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me

“Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.”
― Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me