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Who really said it

It Seems As If Anything I Like Is Either Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening

Not Alexander Woollcott — first recorded from Frank Rand of St. Louis Frank Rand Dates unknown · St. Louis · quoted on the radio in September 1933
Disputed In copyright

The earliest known record belongs to neither of the men usually credited: on 16 September 1933 the Albany Evening News wrote down an anecdote Alexander Woollcott had just told on his radio show, in which a St. Louis man named Frank Rand, lunching miserably on bouillon cubes and undressed lettuce, delivers the line. Fields spoke a version of it on screen the following February in Paramount’s Six of a Kind, and Quote Investigator ↗ credits the saying to Rand, with Woollcott as its popularizer.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“But it seems as if anything I like is either illegal or immoral or fattening.” Not Alexander Woollcott, and not W. C. Fields. The earliest known record is a St. Louis man named Frank Rand, quoted on Woollcott's radio show and written down in the Albany Evening News, 16 September 1933: "But it seems as if anything I like is either illegal or immoral or fattening." Fields spoke a version of it on screen in Paramount's Six of a Kind, released 9 February 1934. — quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Alexander Woollcott. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Paramount Productions, Inc. and its successors in title (Six of a Kind, 1934); the publisher of the Albany Evening News for the 1933 column). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Frank Rand — the dieter behind the line, known only from Woollcott’s radio anecdote. Theme: "It Seems As If Anything I Like Is Either Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It Seems As If Anything I Like Is Either Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The earliest record

First recorded in
“As I Hear It” by The Listener
Published
Albany Evening News, 16 September 1933, p. 14, col. 6
Spoken by
Frank Rand of St. Louis, quoted on air by Alexander Woollcott
Fields’s version
Six of a Kind, Paramount, released 9 February 1934

“Do you eat that stuff because you like it?” someone asked Rand. “No, I hate it,” he replied. “But it seems as if anything I like is either illegal or immoral or fattening.” A radio joke, written down

The columnist — identified by Quote Investigator as Mary A. O’Neill, writing as “The Listener” — was noting down what Woollcott had said on his radio programme. In the setup, Rand is lunching “in the interest of his girth” on bouillon cubes and undressed lettuce. Note the 1933 wording joins the three terms with or; the tidy comma version came later.

Quote Investigator: the full 1933–1938 chronology

How the credit moved

  • 16 September 1933 — The Albany Evening News column “As I Hear It” writes down an anecdote Alexander Woollcott has just told on the radio: Frank Rand of St. Louis, on a punishing diet, says the line. This is the earliest known instance (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • December 1933 — Reader’s Digest prints the saying over Woollcott’s name with no source given; Rand has disappeared from it. Wikiquote still lists the line among Woollcott’s quotes on that citation (Wikiquote ↗).
  • 9 February 1934 — Paramount releases Six of a Kind, with Fields as Sheriff ‘Honest John’ Hoxley opposite Alison Skipworth (Wikipedia ↗); his version of the retort is transcribed from the scene by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 7 April 1938 — Walter Winchell notes the credit drifting once more, to a British Consul-General, after years of running as Woollcott’s (Quote Investigator ↗).
In copyright

This line is not from an old book: its two documented appearances are a newspaper column of 16 September 1933 and a Paramount feature released 9 February 1934, both after the 1931 cut-off for U.S. public domain in 2026, so we treat the sources as in-copyright rather than assert otherwise. Whether a one-sentence quip carries its own protection is a separate question this page does not decide.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Three claimants, one joke

This saying has been pinned on at least three people in its first five years of life. W. C. Fields is the version most people have actually seen — he speaks it on screen in 1934 — but the credit that stuck in print is Alexander Woollcott’s: a December 1933 Reader’s Digest listing that the Yale Book of Quotations, The Quote Verifier and the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs all carried forward (Quote Investigator ↗). Neither man coined it.

W. C. Fields Screen line, not his line

Fields really did say a version of it — on screen in Six of a Kind, released 9 February 1934 by Paramount, where he plays Sheriff ‘Honest John’ Hoxley opposite Alison Skipworth (Wikipedia ↗). Quote Investigator transcribes his retort from the scene, but places it after two 1933 appearances of the joke in print (Quote Investigator ↗). The joke reached the film already made, so it is not a line he coined.

Alexander Woollcott Popularizer, not author

Reader’s Digest printed the saying over Woollcott’s name in December 1933 with no source given, and Wikiquote still lists it among his quotes on that citation (Wikiquote ↗). But the earlier radio report shows him telling it as another man’s remark, and Quote Investigator notes he never claimed to have coined it (Quote Investigator ↗).

An unnamed British Consul-General 1938

By April 1938 Walter Winchell was noting that a newspaper had credited the line to the British Consul-General — “Which is the way we ran it years ago, when it was credited to Alexander Woollcott,” he wrote (Quote Investigator ↗).

On current evidence, Quote Investigator ↗ credits the expression to Frank Rand of St. Louis. Woollcott carried it to a national audience; Fields carried it to the movies.

Context

Why this one travels

It is a joke about appetite, and appetite is universal — which is exactly why the line refuses to stay attached to anyone. In September 1933 it belonged to a man on a lettuce diet. By December a mass-circulation magazine had reassigned it to the most quotable wit in America. By the following February it was coming out of W. C. Fields’s mouth on a Paramount screen, and by 1938 Walter Winchell was watching a newspaper hand it to a British Consul-General. Nobody was lying; the joke simply travels faster than its provenance.

Fields is where it finally settled, and that is its own kind of evidence. He is one of the great attribution magnets: Wikipedia notes that the famous crack about a man who hates dogs and babies was actually made about Fields by the humorist Leo Rosten at a 1939 testimonial dinner, and was later credited to Fields himself by Bartlett’s (Wikipedia ↗). A gravelly, put-upon delivery is enough to make almost any complaint about pleasure sound like his.

Woollcott told it as somebody else’s joke. The world heard it as his — then as Fields’s.

Loose ends: who Rand was, and where else the line surfaced

Who was Frank Rand? Quote Investigator identifies him only as “Mr. Frank Rand of St. Louis.” A prominent St. Louis businessman of that name, Frank C. Rand (1876–1949), ran the International Shoe Company in exactly that period (Wikipedia ↗) — but no source we could fetch connects him to the remark, and this page does not make that identification.

The line kept moving. Quote Investigator records a July 1934 newspaper cartoon caption that carries the joke with no attribution at all, and the fact-check blog Quote/Counterquote notes a further screen version in the 1939 film Love Affair, spoken by Irene Dunne (Quote/Counterquote ↗).

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Happiness Character Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor research: the 1933 Albany radio report, the Reader’s Digest reassignment, Fields’s 1934 film transcript, and QI’s conclusion in favour of Frank Rand.
Alexander Woollcotten.wikiquote.org

Lists the saying among Woollcott’s quotes, sourced to Reader’s Digest (December 1933) — the citation that made him the default author.
W. C. Fieldsen.wikiquote.org

Fields’s sourced and misattributed lines. The saying appears in neither section.
Six of a Kind (1934)en.wikipedia.org

The Paramount comedy, released 9 February 1934, with Fields as Sheriff ‘Honest John’ Hoxley opposite Alison Skipworth.
W. C. Fieldsen.wikipedia.org

Life dates and a documented case of a line being wrongly credited to him — Leo Rosten’s 1939 dinner remark about dogs and babies.
Quote/Counterquote on the sayingquotecounterquote.com

A second fact-check: no appearance in Woollcott’s written works, plus the Fields and 1939 Love Affair screen versions.

The man in the record

Who was Frank Rand?

Frank Rand

St. Louis, 1933 · the dieter behind the line, known only from Woollcott’s radio anecdote

Frank Rand enters the quotation record exactly once: as a St. Louis man grimly lunching on bouillon cubes and undressed lettuce “in the interest of his girth,” whose one-line complaint Alexander Woollcott repeated on the air in September 1933. Quote Investigator credits him with the saying on the strength of that broadcast report — the earliest known instance of it — while noting that Woollcott, not Rand, is the reason the world heard it. Nothing further about him is documented in the sources that trace this line.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented instance

“As I Hear It” by The Listener [identified by Quote Investigator as Mary A. O’Neill], Albany Evening News (Albany, NY), September 16, 1933, p. 14, col. 6; chronology in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: It Seems As If Anything I Like Is Either Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening,” April 9, 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It Seems As If Anything I Like Is Either Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-seems-as-if-anything-i-like-is-either-illegal-immoral-or/

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