An actor, to spend his entire life as an actor, has to have the mind of a child. A writer at sixty can be a Steinbeck, a Faulkner, or a Hemingway. An actor at sixty can make a funny face or do a creaky dance. The actor lives a reasonable-facsimile existence while cavorting in an unreal world. The value of an actor’s services are determined by the needs of another person.

— Fred Allen

Fred Allen Quotes

He’s so small, he’s a waste of skin.

— Fred Allen

He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.

— Fred Allen

Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

— Fred Allen

He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.

— Fred Allen

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

— Fred Allen

Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you’ll end up in the police station.

— Fred Allen

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.

— Fred Allen

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.

— Fred Allen

My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

— Fred Allen

He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

— Fred Allen

When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.

— Fred Allen

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

— Fred Allen

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

— Fred Allen

Everything is for the eye these days – TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

— Fred Allen

If children could vote, Jesse Jackson would be our next president.

— Fred Allen

I’d rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four.

— Fred Allen

In show business, more showgirls are kept than promises.

— Fred Allen

A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

— Fred Allen

Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.

— Fred Allen

An actor, to spend his entire life as an actor, has to have the mind of a child. A writer at sixty can be a Steinbeck, a Faulkner, or a Hemingway. An actor at sixty can make a funny face or do a creaky dance. The actor lives a reasonable-facsimile existence while cavorting in an unreal world. The value of an actor’s services are determined by the needs of another person.

— Fred Allen
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