I read. I watch movies new and old. And things strike me funny. Often there is no particular use to which such amusements can be put. But they can be shared.

Judas: Adam Gopnik in a recent New Yorker offered a lovely quote from Oscar Wilde to the effect that all great men have disciples and Judas writes their biography. How witty. How true. Famous examples are everywhere. Lawrance Thompson spent twenty years to write a three-volume demolition of Robert Frost. That’s a lot of time and labor to expend only to persuade readers your subject was unpleasant.

Cannibals: In writing recently about the Cold War, I recalled but did not quote this classic 1950s bit of Red Scare dialogue from “Night People.” Gregory Peck is Colonel Van Dyke in divided Berlin. Broderick Crawford is Charles Leatherby, a Midwestern industrialist whose callow son has been abducted from the streets and disappeared into the Soviet zone. Crawford has come to town to get him back. He has contacted a Congressman and suggested in a hotel bar he might try to get in touch with the Soviets to make a deal.

When they meet the next morning, Peck unloads on him. “You’re a big wheel in the axle grease business, so naturally you’re a big wheel wherever you want to poke your nose into…You’re gonna get a little action, stir ‘em up, get ‘em off their big fat behinds, is that it? If there’s anything that burns me it’s an amateur trying to tell a pro how to do his job”

Crawford says he’s not trying to tell anyone their business, which only increases Peck’s ire, “No, you’re gonna do it yourself. Cash and carry. Send ‘em some dough. Dough fixes everything. Don’t you know I can have you thrown in the jug for that, trying to make a personal deal with a foreign government?”

And he concludes with a lovely lurid remark. “This isn’t a cash and carry business. You’re not dealing with the A&P now. These are cannibals, Mr. Leatherby, head-hunting, bloodthirsty cannibals who are out to eat us up.”

Pretty good purple prose in the context of 1954, and one can easily imagine the same scene today with a Colonel talking to a Silicon Valley mogul trying to cut a deal with ISIS in Syria to get his son back. Except he would never have a son in the military today.

Powellisms: I have just finished the multi-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell, as frequent readers know. As the tale unfolds the unsuspecting reader keeps bumping into instances of dry wit, comic asides that are insinuated into the story. Here are a few.

Morland, an impecunious and mordant composer, says: Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers.”

Dicky Umfraville, a rake, gambler and ne’er-do-well in his youth, is now no longer young. “You know growing old‘s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” That’s pretty funny, but the retort is better. “Which ones haven’t you committed? You’ve never grown up, darling. You can’t grow old until you’ve done that.”

A British don is telling the narrator about an American don who happens to be descended from a signer of the Declaration.

“Some Americans will, of course, deny any interest whatever in such trivial matters.”

“Kind hearts are more that Cabots?”

“And simple faith than Mormon blood.”

In one passage the narrator has entered his fifties. “After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief.”

General Conyers, a philosophical soldier concludes that “thinking too much damages feeling and vice versa.”

Norman, a gay theater director of a certain age, makes an entrance and is complimented on the elegance of his wardrobe.

“This little number? It’s from the Boutique of the Impenitent Bachelor – Vests and Transvests, we regular customers call the firm. The colour’s named Pale Galilean.”

Those not up on their Victorian poets may miss the second joke. Swinburne, in “Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith),” adopts the voice of a Roman lamenting the end of the pagan worlds: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath…”

And finally, to come full circle, a remark that isn’t funny exactly, but is the kind of witty, upside down paradox Oscar Wilde trafficked in. The self-destructive writer, X. Trapnel, defends his art.

“People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can only be tentative, empirical.”

Lagniappe: Just because no random collection of wit, maxims, apothegms can be complete without the Duc La Rochefoucauld, a few from that lovely man. Often called a cynic or a pessimist, he seems a clear-eyed realist to me.

“We all have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.”

“The evil which we commit does not draw down on us so much hatred and persecution as our good qualities.”

“We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.”

“Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.”

“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.”

“When we cannot find contentment in ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.”