Robert Benchley

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

One of my writer heroes, Robert Benchley, would have been 120 today. Here he is in one of his informational shorts, "How To Be A Detective" (1936), IMDB.

And here he is re-enacting the skit that launched his career in acting and the movies, "The Treasurer's Report" (1928), IMDB.

In a previous life, I was Robert Benchley. Perhaps.

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."

— Robert Benchley

"For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting."

-- Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley

"A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down."

Samuel Butler

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."

Charles Doran

"A man's soul can be judged by the way he treats his dog."

George Bird Evans

"I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren't certain we knew better."

Edward Hoagland

"In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog."

John Holmes

"A dog is not almost-human, and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such."

Lonzo Idolswine

"My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I 'should' be doing."

Franz Kafka

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog."

Rudyard Kipling

"When the Man waked up he said,
'What is Wild Dog doing here?'
And the Woman said,
'His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.'"

Milan Kundera

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace."

John Steinbeck

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts."