Face to Face Confrontations
"Oh my God, look at you. Anyone else hurt in the accident?"
- Don Rickles (to Ernest Borgnine).
"Don't be so humble, you're not that great."
- Golda Meir (to Moshe Dayan).
"Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad."
- Donald Trump (to Larry King).
"I'm not having points taken off me by an incompetent old fool. You're
the pits of the world."
- John McEnroe (to tennis judge Edward James).
"You can't see as well as these fucking flowers - and they're fucking
plastic."
- John McEnroe (to a line judge).
"What other problems do you have besides being unemployed, a moron and
a dork?"
- John McEnroe (to a spectator at a tennis match).
"Who picks your clothes - Stevie Wonder?"
- Don Rickles (to David Letterman on 02/5/96 "Late Show").
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big
words?"
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner).
"He's phoney, using his blackness to get his way."
- Joe Frazier (about Muhammad Ali).
"Joe Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US Bureau of
Wildlife."
- Muhammad Ali.
"His writing is limited to songs for dead blondes."
- Keith Richards (about Elton John).
"I'm glad I've given up drugs and alcohol. It would be awful to be
like Keith Richards. He's pathetic. It's like a monkey with
arthritis, trying to go on stage and look young. I have great respect
for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown
Keith out 15 years ago."
- Elton John (about Keith Richards).
"If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee."
- Lady Astor (to Winston Churchill).
"If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
- Winston Churchill, in reply
"You will either die on the gallows or of a loathsome disease."
- John Montague (to John Wilkes).
"That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
- John Wilkes, in reply.
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
- Oscar Wilde (to Sarah Bernhardt).
"I don't care if you burn."
- Sarah Bernhardt, in reply.
"My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy,
unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?"
- Frederic Leighton (to James McNeill Whistler).
"My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?"
- James McNeill Whistler, in reply.
Excellent put-downs
"He is racist, he's homophobic, he's xenophobic and he's a sexist.
He's the perfect Republican candidate."
- Bill Press (about Pat Buchanan).
"A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all
times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to
malign an opponent and to glorify himself."
- Benjamin Disraeli (about William Gladstone).
"He had a charisma that must have come out of an Immaculate Conception
between Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx. They went into his soul and he
came out looking like an ethnic milkshake - Jewish revolutionary,
Puerto Rican lord, Italian street kid, Black Panther with the old
Afro haircut, even a glint of Irish gunman in the mad, green eyes."
- Norman Mailer (about Abbie Hoffman, 1989).
"Any political party that can't cough up anything better than a
treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves
every beating it gets. They don't hardly make 'em like Hubert any
more but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway."
- Hunter S. Thompson (about Hubert Humphrey, 1973).
"He sits there in senile dementia with a gangrene heart and rotting
brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things
that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to
his grave in snarling infamy... disgraceful, depraved... and
putrescent."
- Hiram Johnson (about Harrison Grey Otis).
"The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it with a liberal
embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless
vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an
impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and
offensively daft. He makes me tired."
- Ambrose Bierce (about Oscar Wilde, 1882).
Actors
"He's the type of man who will end up dying in his own arms."
- Mamie Van Doren (about Warren Beatty).
"You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you."
- Carly Simon (about Warren Beatty).
"What makes him think a middle-aged actor, who's played with a chimp,
could have a future in politics?"
- Ronald Reagan (about Clint Eastwood running for mayor of Carmel).
"Most of the time he sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet
paper."
- Rex Reed (about Marlon Brando).
"He couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner."
- Johnny Carson (about Chevy Chase).
"He acts like he's got a Mixmaster up his ass and doesn't want anyone
to know it."
- Marlon Brando (about Montgomery Clift).
"He got a reputation as a great actor by just thinking hard about the
next line."
- King Vidor (about Gary Cooper).
"His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open."
- Howard Hughes (about Clark Gable).
"Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from
here."
- Groucho Marx (about Chico Marx).
"There were three things that Chico was always on - a phone, a horse,
or a broad."
- Groucho Marx (about his brother, Chico).
"He looked like a half-melted rubber bulldog."
- John Simon (about Walter Matthau).
"His features resembled a fossilised wash rag."
- Alan Brien (about Steve McQueen).
"He has turned almost alarmingly blond - he's gone past platinum, he
must be plutonium; his hair is co-ordinated with his teeth."
- Pauline Kael (about Robert Redford).
"Poor little man, they made him out of lemon Jell-O and there he is.
He's honest and hardworking but he's not great."
- Adela Rogers St. John (about Robert Redford).
"His favourite exercise is climbing tall people."
- Phyllis Diller (about Mickey Rooney).
"Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts."
- Clive James
Athletes
"McEnroe was as charming as always, which means that he was as
charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread."
- Clive James (about John McEnroe).
"Beyond the hair, tattoos and earrings, he's just like you and me."
- Bob Hill (about Dennis Rodman, 1995).
"Dennis has become like a prostitute, but now it's gotten ridiculous,
to the point where he will do anything humanly possible to make
money."
- Charles Barkley (about Dennis Rodman, 1997).
"He has so many fish hooks in his nose, he looks like a piece of
bait."
- Bob Costas (about Dennis Rodman).
Musicians
"I love his work but I couldn't warm to him even if I was cremated
next to him."
- Keith Richards (about Chuck Berry).
"I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized to
how many people he is not a sex symbol but a mother image."
- David Bowie
"He sings like he's throwing up."
- Andrew O'Connor (about Bryan Ferry).
"The instant asphalt Elvis from Philadelphia."
- Fred Schuers (about Fabian).
"Boy George is all England needs - another queen who can't dress."
- Joan Rivers
"Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white
woman."
- Molly Ivins
"Michael Jackson's album was only called 'Bad' because there wasn't
enough room on the sleeve for 'Pathetic.'" - The Artist Formerly
Known as Prince (about Michael Jackson).
"He moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire."
- Truman Capote (about Mick Jagger).
"He sounds like he's got a brick dangling from his willy, and a food-
mixer making purée of his tonsils."
- Paul Lester (about Jon Bon Jovi).
"Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband's penis. Which
explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee."
- Conan O'Brien (about Tommy Lee).
"He could be a manoeuvring swine, which no one ever realised."
- Paul McCartney (about John Lennon).
"A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-
impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, mincing heap of mother
love."
- William Connor (about Liberace).
"Sleeping with George Michael would be like having sex with a
groundhog."
- Boy George
"When you talk to him, he looks at you and grins and grins and nods
and nods and appears to be the world's best listener, until you
realise he is not listening at all."
- Larry L. King (about Willie Nelson).
"He sang like a hinge."
- Ethel Merman (about Cole Porter).
"Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it
altogether."
- Greil Marcus (about Elvis Presley, 1976).
"Presley sounded like Jayne Mansfield looked - blowsy and loud and
low."
- Julie Burchill (about Elvis Presley).
"Bambi with testosterone."
- Owen Gleiberman (about Prince, 1990).
"He looks like a dwarf who's been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair."
- Boy George (about Prince, 1986).
"Even the deaf would be traumatised by prolonged exposure to the most
hideous croak in Western culture. Richards' voice is simply
horrible."
- Nick Coleman (about Keith Richards).
"He plays four-and-a-half-hour sets. That's torture. Does he hate his
audience?"
- John Lydon (about Bruce Springsteen).
"He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom."
- Britt Eklund (about Rod Stewart).
"'Slavic March' - One feels that the composer must have made a bet,
for all his professional reputation was worth, that he would write
the most hideous thing that had ever been put on paper, and he won
it, too."
- Boston Evening Transcript (about Tchaikovsky, 1883).
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its
tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with
its claws."
- Charles Baudelaire (about Richard Wagner).
"Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian
on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favour of annexing Newfundland,
Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow up
the Pope."
- Tony Palmer (about Richard Wagner).
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
- Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye.
"Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like
staring at a cow for forty-five minutes."
- Aaron Copland.
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