Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character Waldo Lydecker in the film Laura . Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied. Wikipedia
“[You look like] a dishonest Abe Lincoln.”
Describing Harold Ross, fellow Round Table member and founder of The New Yorker, as quoted in The American Treasury, 1455-1955 (1955) by Clifton Fadiman, Charles Lincoln Van Doren, p. 461; variants of this quote begin "He looks like..." "He looked like..." etc.
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.”
"The Knock at the Stage Door" in Reader's Digest (December 1933); also in A Dictionary of Catch Phrases : British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (1986) http://books.google.com.br/books?id=Nm3jbg0JalMC&pg=PA24&dq=All+the+things+I+really+like+to+do+are+either+illegal,+immoral,+or+fattening by Eric Partridge and Paul Beale, ISBN 041505916X, ISBN 9780415059169 .
"The Paris Taxi-Driver Considered as an Artist," in Enchanted Aisles (1924).
Referring to George Bernard Shaw in While Rome Burns (1934).
"George the Ingenuous" in Cosmopolitan (November 1933); reprinted in Ch. IV: "'...A Young Colossus...'" https://books.google.com/books?id=ATcjgQTx0uIC&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false from Gershwin Remembered (1992) by Edward Jablonski, pp. 44-45
“I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”
Reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 132.
Misattributed
“The two oldest professions in the world — ruined by amateurs.”
On actors and prostitutes, from his column, as republished in Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights (1922), p. 57.
Radio Memorial http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?Documentid=968 for Anne Sullivan Macy (1936).
