Never eat anything whose listed ingredients
cover more than one-third of the package.JOSEPH LEONARD, from a 1986 Herb Caen
column in the San Francisco Chronicle
Never darken my Dior again!BEATRICE LILLIE, to a waiter who spilled soup on her dress,
in her 1972 autobiography Every Other Inch a Lady
Lillie was a popular stage and screen actress on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the twentieth century. Here she cleverly alters never darken my door again, a centuries-old English saying that means to show up unwanted at a place one has been thrown out of. In nineteenth-century theater, the phrase would typically be delivered by an angry parent expelling an intransigent child from the family home (the darken portion of the saying refers to a person’s shadow appearing on the threshold). Nigel Rees dates the saying to at least 1692 in England. It soon became common enough in colonial America that Ben Franklin used it in The Busybody, a 1729 series of essays. By the twentieth century, the expression would never be used seriously, and in the 1933 film Duck Soup, Groucho Marx put it this way: “Go, and never darken my towels again!”
Never call an accountant a credit to his profession;
a good accountant is a debit to his profession.CHARLES J. C. LYALL
Never subscribe to anything that smells better than it reads.DOUG MARLETTE
I found this a number of years ago in a Kudzu cartoon. It appeared around the time that magazines first began inserting scratch ’n sniff ads for perfumes and fragrances.
I actually learned about sex watching neighborhood dogs.
And it was good. Go ahead and laugh.
I think the most important thing I learned was:
Never let go of the girl’s leg, no matter how hard she tries to shake you off.STEVE MARTIN
Never eat more than you can lift.MISS PIGGY (Jim Henson)
Miss Piggy (formally named Miss Pigathius “Piggy” Lee) was originally viewed by creator Jim Henson as a minor supporting character when he began The Muppet Show in 1975. She eventually became one of the show’s most popular figures and a cultural icon, famous for a diva personality that swung wildly from saccharinely charming when she wanted something to violent rages when her desires were frustrated. She also occasionally tossed out hilarious one-liners, as in the previous dieting tip. She also offered this advice about buying cosmetics: “Never purchase beauty products in a hardware store.”
Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.ADDISON MIZNER
Never raise your hand to your children;
it leaves your midsection unprotected.ROBERT ORBEN
This line is often attributed to comedian Red Buttons, but it was originally authored by Orben. In 1946, at age eighteen, Orben wrote Encyclopedia of Patter, the first of his many joke books (he also published a comedy newsletter for three decades). In the 1950s and ’60s, he was America’s most famous gag writer, doing stints with Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, and Red Skelton. Orben was such a comedic staple in the 1960s that Lenny Bruce said his routines were different from mainstream comics in part because they contained “no Orben jokes.” As a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford, Orben was almost certainly the man who authored Ford’s famous “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln” line.
Never ask old people how they are
if you have anything else to do that day.JOE RESTIVO
Never start offshore oil exploration unless you know the drill.DENNIS RIDLEY, offered shortly after the BP
oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010
Never buy a fur from a veterinarian.JOAN RIVERS
Rivers has also been quoted as offering these additional thoughts:
Never floss with a stranger.
Never let a panty line show around your ankle.
Never play peek-a-boo with a child on a long plane trip.
There’s no end to the game.RITA RUDNER
This came from a Rudner sketch that ended this way: “Finally I grabbed him by the bib and said, ‘Look, it’s always gonna be me!’ ”
Never jog while wearing wingtips—
unless you are attending the Nerd Convention in Atlantic City.MARK RUSSELL
Never do anything you wouldn’t want to explain to the paramedic.SHANNON RYAN
Never look at the trombones; it only encourages them.RICHARD STRAUSS, one of his ten rules for young composers
Never look down on short people.GREG TAMBLYN
Never answer a telephone that rings before breakfast.JAMES THURBER, in Lanterns & Lances (1961)
Thurber added: “It is sure to be one of three types of persons: a strange man in Minneapolis who has been up all night and is phoning collect; a salesman who wants to come over and demonstrate a combination Dictaphone and music box that also cleans rugs; or a woman out of one’s past.”
Never say “oops” in the operating room.DR. LEO TROY, orthopedic surgeon
Never learn to do anything.
If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.MARK TWAIN, quoting facetious advice from his mother
Never run after your own hat—others will be delighted to do it.
Why spoil their fun?MARK TWAIN
Never pick a fight with an ugly person; they’ve got nothing to lose.ROBIN WILLIAMS
Never wear a backwards baseball cap to an interview
unless applying for the job of umpire.DAN ZEVIN, advising Generation-Xers, in
Entry- Level Life: A Complete Guide to Masquerading
as a Member of the Real World (1994)
Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
In 2003, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, made an unexpected gift to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston: thirty previously unpublished letters that her mother had received from another icon of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway. The bequest stipulated that the letters were to be kept private until 2007, fifteen years after Dietrich’s death.
Hemingway and Dietrich first met on the French ocean liner Ile de France in 1934. As the years passed, when they were occasionally seen together, she reverentially called him “Papa,” even though he was only three years her senior, and he called her “my little Kraut” or, as he also did with many of his other female friends, “daughter.”
When the letters—written between 1949 and 1953—were made public in 2007, they set the literary world abuzz. Hemingway fans had long known of the pair’s deep friendship, but few expected the depths of passion revealed in the correspondence. Hemingway was fifty when he wrote his first letter—and married to fourth wife,
