Happy Birthday Harpo Marx!

But I guess that's the way it is. When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost. you mourn for yourself.

Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told.

I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived.

honk honk

Susan, an only child who never had any roots, and I, a lone wolf who got married 20 years to late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us.

Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. "Harpo my boy," he said, "I'm going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember." My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself. "Yes sir?" I said. And he told me the three things. I regret that I've forgotten what they were.

One night I'm playing the harp at this local brothel bar when I felt sick and I practically keeled off the stool. And the Madame says: "Get that son-of-a-bitch back on that stool and play! I've got customers here." So a minute later... again I fell off the stool. She said: "What the hell is the matter with him?" to one of the girls. The prostitute said to the Madame: "He must be sick. I think we should call a doctor." So, they sent for a doctor. Ten minutes later the doctor arrived, he looked at me, and he said to the Madame: "He's got the measles." The Madame said to the doctor: "Then get him the hell out of here. I don't want any sick Jews around me.

He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear.

My name is whaddya care. My home is anywhere. People say I'm awful dumb. So I thought to you I'd come.

I’d like to adopt as many children as I have windows in my house. So when I leave for work, I want a kid in every window, waving goodbye.

In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.

No worse than a bad cold.

If an audience didn't like us we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching - until Minnie gave us the high-sign that we'd collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing stuff back at the audience and run like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down.

Harpo, she's a lovely person. She deserves a good husband. Marry her before she finds one.

I saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen - a row of stores with Stars of David and the word 'Jude' painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn't know what hit them and didn't know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn't been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvahs, and it was the first time since I'd had the measles that I was too sick to eat.

In the fall of 1943 we brought home our second son, whom we named Alexander.

Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After a while you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid.

In 1944 James Arthur and Minnie Susan were added to the Marx household.

If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.

It was the only time I can remember that I worried about turning in a bad performance. The trouble was not with the script, the director, or the falls I had to take. The trouble was Adolf Hitler. His speeches were being rebroadcast in America. Somebody had a radio on the set, and twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream.

He had great integrity. You never had to watch him when he was dealing.