S. J. Perelman Quotes
-
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
-
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-
Before they made S J Perelman they broke the mold.
-
The waiters' eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.
-
Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called 'a conference'.
-
The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.
-
The worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah in Hollywood. He is shunned by his friends, thrown into bankruptcy, and like a Japanese electing hara-kiri, he commits suttee.
-
I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
-
I'll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they've gone, I'll get along. I started off living on gruel, and by God, I can always go back to it again.
-
'Great-grandfather died under strange circumstances. He opened a vein in his bath.''I never knew baths had veins,' protested Gabrilowitsch.''I never knew his great-grandfather had a ba-' began Falcovsky derisively.
-
Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
-
You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock.
-
'Oh, son, I wish you hadn’t become a scenario writer!' she sniffled.'Aw, now, Moms,' I comforted her, 'it’s no worse than playing the piano in a call house.'
-
I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.
-
He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.
-
Santa Barbara people are conservative-not like in L.A., where everybody wears rhinestones on their glasses to show that they own an airplane factory.
-
As for consulting a dentist regularly, my punctuality practically amounted to a fetish. Every twelve years I would drop whatever I was doing and allow wild Caucasian ponies to drag me to a reputable orthodontist.
-
I have Bright's disease and he has mine.
-
Nature, it appears, has been rather more bountiful to Paul's body and purse than to his intellect; above the ears, speaking bluntly, the boy is strictly tapioca.
-
The main obligation is to amuse yourself.
-
I don't know where we're going or how we'll get there, but when we get there we'll be there - and that's something, even if it's nothing.
-
If travel has taught me nothing more, and it certainly has, it's this: you never know when some trifling incident, utterly without significance, may pitchfork you into adventure or, by the same token, may not.
-
A basic ingredient in the manufacture of perfume, the attar-a heavy, pale-yellow oil stored in small metal drums-had been put up as collateral by Bulgaria, in lieu of gold, at the Moscow Narodny Bank, a Communist finance house for East-West trade.
-
English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.