Wise Cracking Quotes & Sayings

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
[Interview, The Paris Review, Summer 1956] — Dorothy Parker

She could get lost staring into the kaleidoscope of unfathomable lifetimes swirling in a human iris. They were haunting and sober and wise, even when she coaxed a jaw-cracking sunny smile from the face they were set in. — Taoist Elf

Frank Fay turned into the most consistent stand-up comic of the late 1920s and essentially changed the art form. Crowds and critics eventually came to accept a man standing alone, cracking wise. No longer did Fay bill himself as a 'Nut Monologist. — Kliph Nesteroff

You listen to me, Beaumont Tyler Grady. You are a wise-cracking, stubborn, annoying pain in the ass who lives to cause trouble. You're also a brave, courageous, and valiant Marine who puts his life on the line for what he believes and for those he loves. There is no way you have ever been or ever will be a coward. It simply isn't in you. — Abigail Roux

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her - long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America ... — Joyce Carol Oates