S. J. Perelman Quotes

33 quotes in 614 categories

• Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.
• I cannot recall a more engaging passage in fiction, and I've been trying for almost eighteen seconds.
• I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.
• The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.
• 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 worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah…
• 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.…
• The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We old roosters must be cautious. Don't try to outwit your arteries.
• Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
• One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest…
• I found the pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester.
• This medal (the National Book Award) together with my American Express card, will identify me worldwide ... except at Bloomingdale's.
• I'm half Scotch-Irish on both sides, and when I lose my temper-brother, I go.
• 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.
• 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,…
• 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…

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