L.A.’s Viceroy of Vitriol : Profile: Jon Winokur, a self-made curmudgeon, collects and publishes nasty comments about life, children, dogs, patriotism, America, love and other sacred cows.

You’re never too old to fall in love.

And that’s too bad.

Jon Winokur thinks so, anyway.

One of his favorite quotations comes from Russian playwright Anton Chekov, who wrote a lover: “I will not meet you at the pier, as it will probably be chilly.”

That Chekov was a warm, sensible guy.

Winokur is sensible, too. There’s no good reason to risk pneumonia over infatuation, he says.

Winokur won’t call himself a curmudgeon “because that’s uncurmudgeonly.”

But he is.

Here’s the evidence:

He’s made an industry out of curmudgeonry.

He collects pithy, often nasty comments by famous wits on topics such as life, children, dogs, patriotism, America and, yes, love. Then he publishes them.

He’s best known for “The Portable Curmudgeon,” first issued in 1987 and now in its 13th printing, for a total of about 150,000 copies. Besides the quotes, the book contains interviews and anecdotes that promote curmudgeon-type viewpoints. There’s also a curmudgeon calendar--first issued for 1990--so that people can start each day with a jolt of pure bile.

“Life is one long process of getting tired.” --Samuel Butler in “The Portable Curmudgeon. “

Winokur also published “A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love” and “Zen to Go” last year and “Writers on Writing” in 1986. All are collections of skeptical wisdom in the curmudgeon format--bite-sized portions of black humor, sarcasm, irony, bitterness, candor and despair--culled through Winokur’s dark filters from a thousand books.

In person, however, Winokur is friendly and not overtly grouchy. He admits to being “a bit of a hermit,” as well as a recently reformed night owl who sometimes relapses into nocturnal habits.

Winokur works out of an office in his condominium. A set of brass knuckles holds down a stack of papers on the corner of the desk. On the wall a big, framed photo of Winston Churchill, holding a tommy gun and chomping a cigar, stands guard.

Why does Churchill hold a place of honor?

Winokur replies, “Here’s a guy who was one of the most effective users of the language, which I think is a great achievement. He really got people to do things through his use of the language. On the other hand, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. To me that’s a rare combination.”

Lady Astor: If you were my husband, Winston, I’d put poison in your tea.

Winston Churchill: If I were your husband, Nancy, I’d drink it.--from “A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love.”

Comfortable in his office-refuge, Winokur leans back in his chair and sketches out his vision of the kingdom of curmudgeons.

” . . . I realized that the dictionary definition of a curmudgeon as a churlish, irascible old man, a crotchety old grouch, needs updating,” he says. “I think nowadays a curmudgeon is anyone who points out unpleasant facts in an engaging, humorous manner. If you’re not a curmudgeon you’re not paying attention.”

But Winokur does not live in some dank outpost of civilization where only fog and rain brighten the day. No, he resides in Pacific Palisades where he wishes it rained more. All that sunshine beckoning a good time when there’s work to be done on a new book about dogs, an animal that Winokur admires as much as he pities the victims of romantic love.

” . . .Romantic love is probably one of the most pernicious myths ever to plague mankind,” he observes. “It’s a form of insanity that overtakes people and no one is immune to it.”

Even one of his most quotable sources, the Baltimore newspaperman, curmudgeon and anti-romantic H.L. Mencken, did not escape, he notes. “Mencken made it to age 50 before he was bitten,” Winokur reports, and then headlines such as “Et tu, Mencken” greeted his marriage.

“A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.”--G.K. Chesterton in “A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love.”

Winokur, 42, himself admits to being smitten once or twice himself, including a marriage that ended in divorce about 10 years ago. It could happen again, he concedes, but don’t count on it.

“Let’s say I’m not sitting here waiting for another person to come along to make my life complete,” he explains. “It’s gotten so complicated. Relationships used to be troublesome, now they’re lethal.”

“I’d marry again if I found a man who had $15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee he’d be dead within a year.” -- Bette Davis quoted in “A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love.”

Romantic love isn’t the sole target of Winokur’s disdain. Most popular culture is fair game, he figures.

“When I autograph books I do that little happy face and draw a line through it,” he says, striking a blow for grumps everywhere. “For Garden of Love, of course, I do a heart with a line through it. Sure it’s a reaction. It’s a reaction to all the humbug, from psychobabble to happy faces to car alarms to adults who say ‘scary.’ It’s a point of view.” (“Scary,” Winokur maintains, is a word strictly for children. It does not have the weight to move up the age ladder.)

“Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.”--Fran Leibowitz quoted in “The Portable Curmudgeon.”

Clearly, Winokur’s greatest, earliest and most enduring passion is for the trenchant comment. He began collecting quotes at age 13, he says. He moved from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in 1973 to work in the record business as an advertising copywriter. He later moved on to self-employment, founding a marketing firm. No matter what he was doing, though, he continued to collect quotes, first on paper and later on a computer.

His first collection of quotes eventually became “Writers on Writing,” soon to be published in a third edition.

“He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.”--Sydney Smith trashing another writer in “Writers on Writing . “

“Writers on Writing” set the tone for the curmudgeon books. It established the mix of vitriol and insight in small helpings that readers in the television age can comprehend without missing a vital moment of “Let’s Make a Deal.”

“People have very short attention spans,” Winokur says. “I know I do. So it’s nice to be able to pick up this book and read one quote or 10 quotes or an interview in a few minutes and put it down. People tell me that they keep it in their bathrooms, many people tell me that. Terrific.”

“Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”--Fred Allen quoted in “The Portable Curmudgeon.

Winokur, however, doesn’t believe his audience is limited to people who spend a lot of time in front of the television or in the bathroom--or both. He thinks he has a lot of allies out there, soul mates equally despairing of life in any lane but their own.

” . . .Everybody knows at least one curmudgeon. Women particularly come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I got this for my father, my uncle, my brother, my husband.’ There are a lot of closet curmudgeons out there,” he says.

It’s less clear where all the Zen Buddhists are out there. But they are there, Winokur says, because his book “Zen To Go” has remained in hardcover since publication last spring.

Compared with the curmudgeon and writing books, “Zen” is a more serious enterprise, a collection of sayings from many sources--including large helpings of Yogi Berra--that illustrate some aspect of the Eastern religion--which Winokur concedes can’t be put in words.

“It’s very difficult to talk about Zen; it’s almost self-contradictory,” he says. “And any book about Zen Buddhism is un-Zenlike by definition.”

But Winokur went ahead anyway, dedicating the book to a friend who was killed in an automobile accident.

In this volume, the quotations are often double-edged, humorous at first but--on consideration--becoming conundrums on existence:

Tom Seaver: Hey, Yogi, what time is it?

Yogi Berra: You mean now?