Denis Norden Quotations

Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car.

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.

A counter tenor is anyone who can count to ten.

I defy anyone to get a decision that quickly these days.

I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.

The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.

What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.

You know you're getting old when a four-letter word for something pleasurable two people can do in bed together is R-E-A-D.

Middle age is when, whenever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater.

If all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, where do all the audiences come from?

And when you're on your own there is that terrifying possibility that you may be the only person on the planet who thinks it's funny - and you have no way of finding out.

It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May.

Frank liked administrative work and was good at it.

Everyone who appears in a scene gets paid.

I've seen radio, variety, revue, pretty well all of it, and of all of them, I have the greatest regard for variety as family entertainment.

Now it would have to go through layers of accountants, then to Network Centre, then you might be given a date 18 months ahead if you were lucky.

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.