Funny Book Quotes: The Two Most Famous Ones Are Fake

Search for funny book quotes and the same two lines come back every time.

One is credited to Groucho Marx. The other to Dorothy Parker. Both are genuinely funny. Neither of them said it.

That is worth knowing before you print one on a tote bag — and once you see how those two got misattributed, you will spot the pattern everywhere.

Below: the real origins of both, one genuinely funny quote that survives checking, and fifty original lines about the reading life that are not pretending to be anybody’s.

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🐴 “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend” — not Groucho Marx

The full line: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

The earliest documented version is from July 1943, credited to Francis Bisson, a public relations officer at the Chicago Board of Trade. And it was not about a dog:

“Outside of a horse, man’s best friend is a book, but inside a horse it’s too dark to read.”

A horse. The joke then travelled for thirty years, picking up new owners along the way — Ted Atkinson in 1947, Jimmy Husson in 1952, Jim Brewer in 1954.

Groucho Marx was not credited until April 1973 — three decades after the joke first appeared, and mercifully after the horse became a dog.

📕 “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly” — not Dorothy Parker

The full line: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

It first appears in 1929, in a self-published book by Bill Miller called To You I Tell It — a collection of joke book-blurbs. Miller’s original wording was different, and he credited it to a made-up reviewer named Frank Dolan:

“Not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Should be thrown with great force.”

The misattribution has a specific culprit. In 1962, the publisher Bennett Cerf reprinted the line in his widely syndicated column, smoothed the wording into the version we know, and assigned it to Dorothy Parker — with no citation at all.

Parker had the right reputation for it, so it stuck. She just never said it.

✅ One That Survives Checking

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1817, Chapter 14

This one is real, and it is more pointed than it first reads. Austen is defending novels — then considered frivolous, largely female reading — in the middle of a novel, in the voice of the narrator, aimed squarely at the people sneering at her genre.

It is the earliest great piece of literary trash talk in English, and she won.

🔍 How To Spot A Fake Funny Quote

The two above share a pattern, and once you know it, you will catch most of them.

A famous wit with no source. Groucho, Parker, Twain and Wilde attract orphan jokes the way magnets attract filings. If a funny line is credited to one of them with no book, play, or column named, be suspicious.

The joke is older than the attribution. Both of ours were decades old before the famous name arrived. Misattribution usually upgrades a joke to a bigger name, never downgrades it.

The wording keeps changing. Real quotes are stable because they exist in print. If you find three versions of a line, you are probably looking at folklore.

Check before you credit. Search the exact line in quotation marks alongside a book title. If nothing names a source, the honest move is to share it with no name attached.

😄 Fifty Lines About Reading That Aren’t Pretending

Everything below was written for TBR Club. They are not quotes, nobody famous said them, and there is nothing to misattribute. Use them freely.

TBR Club is reader-supported. If one of these makes you laugh, most of them exist on shirts and mugs at tatata.store, our own shop — that’s how this blog pays for itself.

The daily reality of a reader

I’m not antisocial. I’m just chemically, emotionally and physically attached to my current chapter.
My favorite book is the one where nobody talks to me while I read it.
Do not disturb. My book and I are having a moment.
Life is just a series of obstacles preventing you from reading your book.
What time is it? Who cares. I’m reading.
Warning: I may spontaneously talk about books.
Reading forever, housework whenever.
I was going to be productive today, but then my book got interesting.
Hello, I’m reading. Go away.
I could spend a week with no human contact and call it a holiday.

Confessions of the TBR pile

I was born with a reading list I will never finish.
It’s not hoarding if it’s books.
I don’t have a problem. I have a collection.
My TBR pile has its own postcode.
Yes, I’ve read some of them. Next question.
The shelf is full. The wishlist is fuller.
I’ll get to it. I have a whole retirement planned around it.
Buying books and reading books are two different hobbies and I am excellent at one of them.
Every book on that shelf is a promise I made to myself.
Stop asking how many I haven’t read. I don’t want to count either.

The dangerous allure of buying more

I came. I saw. I bought three more I have no room for.
I could stop buying books, but I’m not a quitter.
In my defense, I was left unsupervised and the bookstore was open.
My problem isn’t buying too many books. It’s that I shop faster than I read.
One does not stop buying books simply because there is no more shelf space.
“I have enough books” is a sentence I have never once completed out loud.
In a committed relationship with my bookstore loyalty card.
The bookstore is not a shop. It is a place of worship with a card reader.
Shipping was free, so really I saved money.
When I think about books, I touch my shelf.

The delusions of late-night reading

“I’ll sleep after this chapter” is the most persistent lie in publishing.
Spoiler alert: “just one more chapter” is always a lie.
It’s 2am and I have made a series of decisions.
I regret nothing except the alarm I set six hours ago.
The book said “finish me in one sitting” and I am not one to argue.
Sleep is a subscription service I keep forgetting to renew.
Tomorrow me is a problem for tomorrow me.
I’m not tired. I’m three hundred pages in.
Nothing good happens after midnight except the last four chapters.
I have never once stopped at a chapter break. Not once.

The dramatic soul of a book lover

Please don’t disturb. I’m emotionally unavailable due to a plot twist.
I am not crying. The author is crying and I am simply nearby.
That ending has personally wronged me.
I need a week and nobody should speak to me.
I’m fine. I just finished a book and now I live here, in this feeling.
Fictional grief is still grief and I would like it acknowledged.
I trusted that author. That was my first mistake.
Somebody check on me in three business days.
The book is over and I have nowhere to put all of this.
Recommending a book is just asking someone to be sad with you later.

Final Thoughts

Funny quotes are the easiest thing in the world to misattribute, because a joke travels faster than its source and a famous name makes it travel faster still.

So here is a modest proposal: share the funny line, skip the famous name. The joke is just as good without it, and you will never be the person who put a horse joke from 1943 on a mug with the wrong face on it.

What’s the most relatable thing you’ve read about being a reader — and have you ever caught a quote you’d been sharing for years? Tell us in the comments.

For lines you can use as captions, we have 65 original bookish captions. For quotes that do survive checking, every line in our 11 sourced book quotes carries its book and year — and the Charlotte Brontë collection follows the same rule.

Sources

“Outside of a dog…” — earliest version July 1943, credited to Francis Bisson, using a horse; Groucho Marx first credited April 1973. Quote Investigator
“Not a book to be lightly thrown aside…” — Bill Miller, To You I Tell It, 1929, credited to the invented reviewer “Frank Dolan”; rephrased and reassigned to Dorothy Parker by Bennett Cerf in 1962. Quote Investigator
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1817, Chapter 14

This still happens with living authors, and the film makes it worse. Most Freida McFadden quote graphics say The Housemaid underneath, and a good number of those lines are from a different book.

All fifty lines in the final section are original writing created for TBR Club.

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