S. J. Perelman Quotes

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.

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

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

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 such a thing as too much couth.

The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

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

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

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.

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.

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

To err is human, to forgive supine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.