Edgar Bergen Quotations

I've never told you the story of Alice in Wonderland, have I?

Well, a friend in need is a friend indeed.

After 13 years of life on the half shell in Hollywood, I have made a trip where I wasn't a tourist.

You find out your mistakes from an audience that pays admission.

Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville.

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

But Charlie, Charlie, how can we ever really know anything? Charlie, what or who is God?

Hey kid, do you want to come and talk to Charlie?

I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers.

OK, magic boy, let's see who you really are.

So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!

We had to have a star each week.. Possibly our program being on Sunday and having a little fun with the Bible was dangerous.

Funny, nothing ever happens nowadays.

Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Early bird gets the worm, but the second worm gets to live. Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?

When I ask him these questions and he answers, I haven't got the faintest idea what he's going to say, and what he says astounds me with his wisdom. It is so much more that I know.

My friend Charlie McCarthy is, of course, much more of a celebrity than he was 13 years ago... They wanted to see McCarthy: striped pants, monocle, derby and Bergen's bald head. If that had happened in radio, the reaction would have been slow, diffused and debatable. I wouldn't learn anything from an audience sitting in a broadcasting studio in Hollywood, because those people all are in my business.

I would like to see a vaudeville world of three-a-day. Five-a-day is too many. Managers who are trying to profit at that rate will gorge themselves right out of business. You can't put entertainment on a production line basis.

To think that this was once Happy Valley.