Cartoonists

"Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour."

"I think we're past the time in history where you have to come out and say, "you know I'm just happy all the time! I'm a joker, I'm a crazy man!" you know kind of thing. I think people understand I can turn that switch on but I'm also a sensitive, normal human being with feelings and I know how to express those too."

"I like people. They're entertaining. I just may laugh at different things than most people. I laugh at mistakes. I laugh at how you recover from mistakes."

"If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret."

"I enjoy my life. The fame part of it freaked me out for a little while, and there are definitely times when it's not so great to be special and known by everybody — you know, when you're wearing the wrong thing, or just in a vulnerable place. But I'm good with my life now."

"There are two thoughts that will ensure success in all you do; (1) Don't tell everything you know, and (2) until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass."

"Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes."

"You are a bastard. Hi @JimCarrey do you know the history of #RosaPark?"

"My singles' number one and Shabba don't rank"

"You can criticise me all the way to the bank"

"(Parodying Informer by Snow)"

"I wish I could do some really weird stuff for you guys, you know?"

"Well as the vanquished charwoman of time begins to Shake-n-Vac the shagpile of eternity, I've noticed that we've just run out of time..."

"An interviewer had researched Lyttelton's other interests and asked him about "orthinology" (sic). Lyttelton said that he kept a straight face and answered the question but 24 hours later thought of what he should have replied: "Oh, you mean word-botching"."

"Radio personality, humorist, writer, cartoonist, ex-Guards officer and aristocrat – Humphrey Lyttelton’s status as one of Britain’s favourite all-rounders sometimes overshadowed his true stature as a jazz musician. But jazz was always his first, abiding love. In 1936, as an Eton schoolboy, he fell under the spell of Louis Armstrong, taught himself trumpet and formed a band. After World War II, he spearheaded Britain’s trad-jazz revival, though he was always more in it than of it. Bored by the purists’ dogmatic style, he broke ranks in 1953 by adding a non-trad saxophone to his group. At the concert, outraged zealots responded with the banner: ‘Go home, dirty bopper!’ But as the title of one of Lyttelton’s books put it, I play as I please; what pleased him was imaginative, swinging jazz with plenty of emotional energy. This was evident from the washboard whimsy of his early recordings and his jovial forays into calypso, to the jump-band vigour of the mid-1950s that evolved into the smooth, hard-driving mainstream which he continued to the end of his life. In a career spanning over six decades, till his death in 2008, he encouraged and inspired many of the most prominent jazz musicians in Britain."

"One musn't be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona. ... He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland."

"Coincidence is a wonderful thing."

"After tasting the meat pies, Samantha said she liked Mr Dewhurst’s beef in ale; although she preferred his tongue in cider."

"Now it's time to play a brand new game called Name That Barcode. Here's the first one: "Thick black, thin white, thick black, thick white, thick black, thin white." OK who's going to identify that?"

"A little work, a little gay To keep us going—and so good-day! A little warmth, a little light Of love’s bestowing—and so, good-night. A little fun, to match the sorrow Of each day’s growing—and so, good-morrow! A little trust that when we die We reap our sowing—and so—good-bye!"

"Life ain’t all beer and skittles, and more’s the pity; but what’s the odds, so long as you’re happy?"

"Judge: "You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?" Co-respondent: "Not a wink, my lord!""

"I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?" "I left off struggling."

"I like seeing experienced girls home." "But I'm not experienced!" "You're not home yet!"

"Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-bottle?"

"'Isaiah' – what a funny name for a teddy bear!" "Well, you see one eye's 'igher than the other."

"I want to back the favourite, please. My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways!"

"For Heaven's sake, send help! There's a man trying to get into my room and the door's locked!"

"Do you like Kipling?" "I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled."

"Can't see my little Willy."

"In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish."

"She didn't ask me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding."

"Strube is a gentle genius. I don't mind his attacks because he never hits below the belt. Now Low is a genius, but he is evil and malicious. I cannot bear Low."

"I have never met anyone who wasn't against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves."

"That is all right. I had them on my list too."

"Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand."

"Very well, alone."

"The scum of the earth, I believe?" "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?"

"Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right! A conference should be held at once for the U. S. A. to pay back the money Europe owes her."

"[Winston Churchill]...detested David Low's politics, while admiring his skill. Low was a New Zealand Communist who was a favourite of Beaverbrook's. I found his employment inexplicable. In his own quirkish way Beaverbrook was a true patriot, yet he employed people like Frank Owen, Michael Foot and, appropriately below all, Low. Competent and talented they undoubtedly were, but the harm they did in opposing Britain's rearmament programme against Hitler is appalling. One of Low's cartoons depicted Colonel Blimp, his favourite Tory butt, exclaiming over our belated, inadequate but desperately needed arms programme of the late 1930s: 'Gad Sir, if we want to keep our place in the sun, we must darken the sky with our planes.' I would like to have confronted these gentlemen with the sight of one of our stricken airfields in the Battle of Britain. Would they have adopted for their own use Churchill's earlier saying: 'I have often eaten my own words and found them on the whole a most nourishing diet'? I doubt it."

"It may well be, that the future historian, asked to point to the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars will reply without hesitation, "Colonel Blimp"."

"Any two opposite colours of the rainbow (eg yellow and blue) , form a third between them, thus imparting to each other their peculiar qualities . The sight of what they were originally is quite lost, and instead, a most pleasing green is found, which colour, nature has chosen for the vestment of the earth, and with the beauty of which the eye never tires."

"[T]he connoisseurs and I are at war you know; and because I hate them, they think I hate Titian—and let them!"

"There is another Set of Gentry more noxious to the art than these, and those are your Picture-Jobbers from abroad, who are always ready to raise a great Cry in the Prints, whenever they think their Craft is in Danger; and indeed it is in their Interest to depreciate every English Work, as hurtful to their Trade, of continually importing Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona's, and other dismal, dark Subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental; on which they scrawl the terrible cramp Names of some Italian Masters, and fix on us poor Englishmen the Character of Universal Dupes."

"After the March to Finchley, the next print I engraved, was the Roast Reef of old England; which took its rise from a visit I paid to France the preceding year. The first time an Englishman goes from Dover to Calais, he must be struck with the different face of things at so little a distance. A farcical pomp of war, pompous parade of religion, and much bustle with very little business. To sum up all, poverty, slavery, and innate insolence, covered with an affectation of politeness, give you even here a true picture of the manners of the whole nation... By the fat friar, who stops the lean cook that is sinking under the weight of a vast sirloin of beef, and two of the military bearing off a great kettle of soup maigre, I meant to display to my own countrymen the striking difference between the food, priests, soldiers, &c. of two nations so contiguous, that in a clear day one coast may be seen from the other."

"He was pure Cockney, intolerant of everything foreign. English painting, so far as it has excelled at all, has done so in inverse relation to the influence of Italy and France. I do not know of any foreign painter except Svoboda who rivalled the English School in their own métier. Comparable Parisians of the nineteenth century tended towards the lubricious or the allegorical. There is one corner of the artistic field that will remain for ever England."

"In only one branch of painting, and that not the most honoured even in our own country, did we produce a unique, idiosyncratic national school. That is the school of narrative composition founded by Hogarth and perfected a hundred years later. It would be absurd to claim a place for him beside Titian and Velasquez, even beside Goya. He was in no sense a great painter, but he is a national figure comparable to Dr Johnson or Trollope, of whom we may well be proud... The school which Hogarth founded may be defined as the detailed representation of contemporary groups, posed to tell a story and inculcate a moral precept. The figures are not merely caught and preserved in certain attitudes; previous and subsequent events are implicit in the scene portrayed. Hogarth's moral lessons are commonplace, commonsensical: that extravagance leads to destitution, debauchery to madness, crime to the gallows, loveless marriage to infidelity and so on. It remained for the more delicate sentiment of the Victorians to refine on these maxims."

"It is to Hogarth's honour that in so many scenes of satire or ridicule, it is obvious that ill-nature did not guide his pencil. His end is always reformation, and his reproofs general."

"Hogarth resembles Butler, but his subjects are more universal, and amidst all his pleasantry, he observes the true end of comedy, reformation; there is always a moral to his pictures. Sometimes he rose to tragedy, not in the catastrophe of kings and heroes, but in marking how vice conducts insensibly and incidentally to misery and shame. He warns against encouraging cruelty and idleness in young minds, and discerns how the different vices of the great and the vulgar lead by various paths to the same unhappiness."

"It cannot, indeed, be truly said of Hogarth, that he improved the practice of the arts of Painting and Engraving, which he professed; but he merited the praise of having more powerfully exhibited their moral utility than any of his predecessors."