S. J. Perelman Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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".

S. J. Perelman
'Oh, son, I wish you hadn't become a scenario writer!' she sniffed.
'Aw, now, Moms,' I comforted her, 'it's no worse than playing the piano in a call house.'

S. J. Perelman
Five months after I joined the enterprise, it was stricken with bankruptcy, the medical name for mercantile atrophy.

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
Philomène was a dainty thing, built somewhat on the order of Lois De Fee, the lady bouncer. She had the rippling muscles of a panther, the stolidity of a water buffalo, and the lazy insolence of a shoe salesman.

S. J. Perelman
"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."

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
"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.

S. J. Perelman
A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth.

S. J. Perelman
There is no danger of my getting scurvy [while in England], as I have to consume at least two gin-and-limes every evening to keep the cold out.

S. J. Perelman
Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S. J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy.

S. J. Perelman
Groucho Marx: With a little study you'll go a long way, and I wish you'd start now.

S. J. Perelman
Outside of a spring lamb trotting into a slaughterhouse, there is nothing in the animal kingdom as innocent and foredoomed as the new purchaser of a country place. The moment he scratches his signature on the deed, it is open season and no limit to the bag.

S. J. Perelman
Look at me. Worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

S. J. Perelman
I'm highly irritable and my senses bruise easily, and when they are bruised, I write.

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
There is nothing like a good, painstaking survey full of decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze like a Sung vase on your eyeball.

S. J. Perelman
I want to register a complaint…You know who sneaked into my stateroom at three o'clock this morning?…Nobody, and that's my complaint.

S. J. Perelman
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.

S. J. Perelman
The mere mention of Hollywood induces a condition in me like breakbone fever. It was a hideous and untenable place when I dwelt there, populated with few exceptions by Yahoos, and now that it has become the chief citadel of television, it's unspeakable.

S. J. Perelman