S. J. Perelman Quotations

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.

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.

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.

The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

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.

In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero's shoulders and the heroine's balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel.

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.

I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.

"In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."

FREEDLEY: Will I feel better after I take it? DR. FITCH (coldly): I, am a physician, Freedley, not an astrologer. If you want a horoscope, there's a gypsy tearoom over on Lexington Avenue.

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.

In my more pompous moments I like to think of myself as a writer rather than a humorist, but I suppose that's merely the vanity of advancing age.

I'm half Scotch-Irish on both sides, and when I lose my temper-brother, I go.

This medal (the National Book Award) together with my American Express card, will identify me worldwide ... except at Bloomingdale's.

I found the pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester.

One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique..., the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 F and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble.

To err is human, to forgive supine.

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.

If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.

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.

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.

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.

I cannot recall a more engaging passage in fiction, and I've been trying for almost eighteen seconds.

We old roosters must be cautious. Don't try to outwit your arteries.

Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.

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.

There is something about a home aquarium which sets my teeth on edge the moment I see it. Why anyone would want to live with a small container of stagnant water populated by a half-dead guppy is beyond me.

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.

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 loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.

All right, so call me Miss Cliche of 1960, but the thing about the married ones that always spooks me is how sweet and attentive they are at first, when they're on the prowl.

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.

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.

Do you know anything at all that nobody else knows or, for that matter, gives a damn about? If you do, then sit tight, because one of these days you're going to Hollywood as a technical supervisor on a million dollar movie.

Where would the Rockefellers be today if old John D. had gone on selling short-weight kerosene ... to widows and orphans instead of wisely deciding to mulct the whole country.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage, and similar chlorophyll. Any dietitian will tell you that a running foot of apple strudel contains four times the vitamins of a bushel of beans.

The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.