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S. J. Perelman quotes
The main obligation is to amuse yourself.
S. J. Perelman
The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.
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 diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
S. J. Perelman
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
S. J. Perelman
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
S. J. Perelman
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.
S. J. Perelman
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
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
To err is human; to forgive, supine.
S. J. Perelman
He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.
S. J. Perelman
[The waiters'] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.
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
Before they made S J Perelman they broke the mold.
S. J. Perelman
I have Bright's disease and he has mine.
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
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
Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflicted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet.
S. J. Perelman
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
S. J. Perelman
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.
S. J. Perelman
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.
S. J. Perelman
Five months after I joined the enterprise, it was stricken with bankruptcy, the medical name for mercantile atrophy.
S. J. Perelman