S.J Perelman Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

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

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.

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.

I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.

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.