S.J. Perelman Quotes

Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity. I know how to control the universe. So tell me, why should I run for a million?

It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated.

Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.

I know how to control the Universe. Why would I run to get a million, tell me?

If they need my C.V., they don’t know my work.

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

I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

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

The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

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

It is people like me who are isolated.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To err is human, to forgive supine.

I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don't believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.

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.

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

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

He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

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.

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

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change - as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

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

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.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

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.

You can only be a control freak when you have weak people around you.

Some people spend their lives failing and never notice.

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

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.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.

I think that people will always want music; I think that the form that they will get it in, or distributed to them from, and the price they pay for it is what's up in question.

That's the New York thing, isn't it. People who seem absolutely crazy going around telling you how crazy they used to be before they had therapy.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body. Some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad.

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.

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

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.

Love is the direct opposite of hate. By definition it's something you can't feel for more than a few minutes at a time, so what's all this bullshit about loving somebody for the rest of your life?