Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 - August 27, 1971) was an American
publisher, one of the founders of American publishing firm Random House.
Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for
regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for
his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line? (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)
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Middle age is when your old classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald
they don't recognize you.
Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.
There have been too many books in which some young man is looking
forward, backward or sideways in anger. Or in which some Southern youth
is being chased through the magnolia bushes by his aunt. She catches him
on page 28 with horrid results.
The Atomic Age is here to stay- but are we?
Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.
A pat on the back, though only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in
the pants, is miles ahead in results
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 the piece so that she could
still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused
of incest. Do you still want to be a writer? And if so, why?
In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and
then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And
nobody understood Ein.
There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't
watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.
We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. (on
naming his publishing company Random House)
Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like
a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness count for something.
The fun of reading is not that something is told to you, but that you
stretch your mind. Your own imagination works along with the author's,
or even goes beyond his, yields the same or different conclusions, and
your ideas develop as you understand his
Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.
I think television people have a definite responsibility just like book
publishers.
TV's sameness has destroyed many things, such as the American urge
toward independent thought.
It's my theory that we're all hams a little bit under the surface.
I think the right to read is one of our inherent rights, and I think
that people in America today are intelligent enough to decide for
themselves what they want to read.
-----
(Today is also the birthday of Ralph
Waldo Emerson)
Categories:
Bennett Cerf,
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