A collection of quotes and sayings by S.J. Perelman on humor, amuse, sci-fi, writing, funny, love, living, will, teeth, sympathy, bite, urban, rural and personality.
An established writer and cartoonist, S.J. Perelman was one of the greatest American humorists and an Oscar winning screenwriter. He wrote for various magazines which includes ‘Judge’. However, he is famed star for writing humorous short pieces for ‘The New Yorker’. Perelman established himself as a writer of short stories and satires. He got his big break when he wrote a drama based on the book, ‘Walk A Little Faster’. He later started co-writing with his wife, Laura, and the duo scripted few of the best dramas of that time. ‘All Good Americans’, ‘One Touch Of Venus’ and ‘The Beauty Part’ are a few of the plays written by him amongst various others. Perelman was also a successful screenwriter and his first movie as a screenwriter was, ‘Monkey Business’. The movie ‘Around the World In 8 Days’ earned him an ‘Academy Award’ for the best screenplay. Perelman is known to have expressed his views and thoughts on issues close to his heart in a witty and humorous manner. Go through the compilation of some famous, witty and funny quotes and thoughts by 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
S. J. Perelman
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
S. J. Perelman
I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.
