Ring Lardner > Quotes

“Shut up,' he explained.”
― Ring Lardner

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
― Ring Lardner

“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.”
― Ring Lardner

“Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty”
― Ring Lardner

“Are you lost, Daddy?" I asked tenderly. "Shut up," he explained.”
― Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrunts

“He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.”
― Ring Lardner

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”
― Ring Lardner

“Some like them hot,some like them cold.
Some like them when they're not to darn old
Some like them fat,some like them lean.
Some like them only at sweet sixteen.
Some like them dark,some like them light.
Some like them in the park,late at night.
Some like them fickle,some like them true,
But the time I like them is when they're like you”
― Ring Lardner

“Although he is a very poor fielder, he is a very poor hitter.”
― Ring Lardner

“I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.”
― Ring Lardner

“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong - but that's the way to bet.”
― Ring Lardner

“For inst. when the telephone rings now days I am scared to death that its somebody asking us to go somewheres for dinner or somewheres. Six yrs. ago I was afraid it wasn't. At 29 home was like they say on the vaudeville stage, a place to go when all the other joints was closed up. At 35 its a place you never leave without a loud squawk.”
― Ring Lardner, Symptoms of Being 35

“They’s no use kiddin’ ourself any more,’ said Tommy Haley. ‘He might get down to thirty-seven in a pinch, but if he done below that a mouse could stop him. He’s a welter; that’s what he is and he knows it as well as I do. He’s growed like a weed in the last six mont’s. I told him, I says, “If you don’t quit growin’ they won’t be nobody for you to box, only Willard and them.” He says, “Well, I wouldn’t run away from Willard if I weighed twenty pounds more.”’
‘He must hate himself,’ said Tommy’s brother.
‘I never seen a good one that didn’t.”
― Ring Lardner, The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner

“The love interest and climax would come when a man and a lady, both strangers, got to talking together on the train going back east.

"Well," said Mrs. Croot, for it was she, "what did you think of the Canyon?"

"Some cave," replied her escort.

"What a funny way to put it!" replied Mrs. Croot. "And now play me something.”
― Ring Lardner, How to Write Short Stories with Samples

“Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.”
― Ring Lardner, Lardner on Baseball

“Then we quit jokeing and he says You have improved a hole lot”
― Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al

“I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks--too sick for the Mrs. to give me the news. And it's a wonder I didn't”
― Ring Lardner, The Big Town - How I and the Mrs. go to New York to see life and get Katie a husband

“Some of ours is so crooked they can't lay in a birth only when the trains making a curve.”
― Ring Lardner, Lardner on Baseball