S J Perelman Quotes

The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I had a hell of a time getting here, brother,” I revealed when we had finished trading insincerities.

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 method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique..., the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 F and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble.

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century." ~ S J Perelman

Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But

immortality is a chancy matter, subject to the caprice of the unborn. Not

The manager of the enterprise, a foxy-nose with a serried gray marcel that mounted like a linotype keyboard, was the soul of courtesy.

Lox vobiscum, and give my regards to Broadway.” His

Sure I like Grossinger’s,” it was saying, “but let me warn you—if you go up there, be sure and wear sunglasses. You can get snow blindness from the sour cream.” It

He opened my eyes to just how great S. J. Perelman was, superior to all other funny minds, an axiom I hold to this day.

For the written record in this personal document, let me simply say to me, Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, and Elaine May are indisputably funny, with S.J. Perelman the funniest human of my time on earth.

It was grudgingly conceded by the traffic wizards that in abolishing so-called normal hazards like sharp curves, intersections, traffic signals, and pedestrian and railroad crossings they had substituted the peril of deadly monotony. The

Look, Grover Cleveland,” one of them finally snapped at me after my third approach. “Harmoniums and water wings, diavolos and pungs we got, but Victorian easy chairs—nyet. And now, excuse me, will you? I have another nudnick here wants a round table like King Arthur’s.

By this same post, I am delegating a close friend of mine, Irving Wiesel, to visit your place of business and ferret out the truth. You can lay your cards on the table with Wiesel or not, as you see fit. When he finishes with you, you will have neither cards nor table.

The Shapiras brought me the book "The Road to Miltown" by S.J. Perelman, and I still have it. It's moved with me across the country, put up in innumerable bookshelves, for almost fifty years. It's showing signs of wear. (Hell, so am I, but we're both still good to take to bed.)

Look at this shirt!” exclaimed Schrift, with sudden irrelevant fury. “Specially made for me by Thresher & Glenny in London—it cost more than you probably spent on coal last winter. If I told ’em once, I told ’em a hundred times—I want the monogram in Old English, not roman type! What do they think I am—a letterhead? No wonder the British Empire’s falling apart.

A moment later, Schrift reappeared in a striking pair of undershorts, with vertical stripes like French wallpaper. “Now, for openers,” he began, extracting the trees from a pair of suède chukker boots, “did you read this new best seller Valuta, by Waldemar Knobnose!” “Only the first eighteen pages,” I admitted. “The woman whose copy it was got off the bus at Altman’s.

An inexpressible radiance suffused me. The chair was so much more beautiful than my cinematic memory that speech was inadequate. It was a haven, a refuge; I saw myself lolling in it, churchwarden poised, evolving new cosmogonies, quoting abstruse references to Occam’s razor and Paley’s watch. “Oh, God,” I choked, extracting a fistful of bills. “I—You’ve made me so happy! How much?

MENDOZA (hoarsely): I tell you the blood is boiling in my veins! You are a candy store filled with luscious nougats, a henhouse from which the pullets have yet to be stolen! MAVIS: Promise me one thing. Whatever happens— whatever they should tell you about me—we’ll always have this moment together. MENDOZA: Parbleu! Do you think I am a milk-sap, that you can put me off with your bobbery? What stands between us—this man’s foot sticking out from behind the davenport? MAVIS: Of course not. It’s—well—it’s that you’re not the man I thought you were. Who are you, anyway? MENDOZA: (simply): The exterminator.

MAVIS (coming up close to him): Robin, don’t you notice anything different about me? ROBIN (sniffing): Hm-m-m. Why, yes, you’ve got a funny smell. MAVIS: Don’t you find me heady, sultry, confusing? ROBIN: No. (critically) But you’ve put on a lot of weight lately. MAVIS: Have I? ROBIN: You certainly have. You’re as big as a house. And your slip is showing. MAVIS: I’m not wearing a slip. ROBIN: Well, it would show if you were. MAVIS: Anything else? ROBIN: Maybe I shouldn’t call attention to it. MAVIS: No, no, darling. By all means call attention to it. ROBIN: You’re getting wrinkles under the eyes. And a scraggly neck, like a turkey. MAVIS: Not much gets past you, does it? ROBIN (comfortably): I guess I’m just about as wide awake as anybody in the hardware business.

Well—er—you see, my face never changes,” I replied evasively, “but there’s this portrait of me that ages instead.

In reading them, it is well to remember that many portions are in anapaestic pentameter, as they were intended to be sung through tissue paper stretched over a comb. No

PUDOVKIN: Kind of pooped, eh? You’ll lose that bay window before we’re through with you. BESSEMER (panting): Say, bud, bring me a glass of water, will you? MRS. BESSEMER: I’ll take some plain ginger ale. PUDOVKIN: Wouldn’t you rather have a tall, cool rum collins with mint and lots of ice? MRS. BESSEMER: Why, that sounds delicious. PUDOVKIN (comfortably) : Doesn’t it? I’ll hop down the mountain and get one. It’s only four miles—the exercise’ll do me good. BESSEMER: Look, if it’s any trouble, I’d just as soon— PUDOVKIN: Nonsense, that’s what I’m paid for, to run down every time some lush wants a snort. Or if you prefer, I can carry you down on my back.

MRS. BESSEMER: Yes, sir? PUDOVKIN: If this is chicken consommé, so is Lake Louise. And you can tell the manager I said so. MRS. BESSEMER: But you’re the manager, Mr. Pudovkin. PUDOVKIN (to the others): Well, I’ve heard all the excuses, but that’s a new one.

Two young ladies, in toreador pants and mohair sweaters, whose swirling coiffures looked as though they had been squeezed from an icing gun, had ranged themselves at the fountain. They

At first they were pitched in a low, rasping hum devoid of vowels, somewhat like Icelandic but more bestial. As

Take one thing with another, there are few places I know better than the heart of Africa. Set me down in Bechuanaland or the Cameroons and I will find my way home with less difficulty than I would from Rittenhouse Square or Boylston Street. My

Back for the summer, eh?” he inquired. “Say, you certainly look awful. What are those big circles under your eyes?” “Glasses,” I said evenly. “What the hell do you think they are?

To adduce proof that the husky, straw-hatted young man in gabardine who tailed me the whole next month was an F.B.I. operative is impossible, nor can I swear that my mail was fluoroscoped during that period. I do know that for a while I underwent all the tremors of a Graham Greene character on the run, even if it had no purificatory effect on my religious views. When

True, it was a difficult chair to slumber in; at the beginning, its magnificence overawed me and I sat gingerly in it, holding at eye level a copy of Sir Samuel Baker’s The Albert Nyanza in crushed levant. I then tried browsing through the latest English review, but somehow couldn’t get past the pictures of Ovomalt and thermal underwear. At last, I found the key in Max Lerner’s windy periods, and, lapped in his peristaltic rhetoric, slept like a baby. Once inside that chair, Lerner in hand, I was as remote from hypertension as from the Asiatic capitals where he bombinated.

The other occupants of my car were a pair of tall, willowy thoroughbreds apparently checking in from Oshkosh, for they were flanked by luggage, the color of a weathered skull, of every conceivable size. From the scorn they evinced, I sensed that they were unaccustomed to persons bearing packages, so I receded as far as I was able into the costly woodwork. The coryphee who opened the door of Schrift’s antechamber, a Dresden-china shepherdess with scallops of blue-black hair framing her face, looked like the secretaries he generally used on his lightning visits from the Coast—more adept at disengaging a zipper at the Copa than at shorthand. She

I mean, he didn’t get in till four. He hosted a party at Neuralgio’s for our new French author, Claude Nasal-Passages, and then everybody went on to the Twelve Apostles.

She was accompanied by a vital, leathery taxpayer with protuberant eyes, opulently clad in a black astrakhan coat sporting a mink collar. His face was screwed around an unlit Partagas which he was savagely chewing into submission.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

For years I have let dentists ride rough-shod over my teeth; I have been sawed, hacked, chopped, whittled, bewitched, bewildered, tattooed, and signed on again; but this is cuspid’s last stand.

They, too, have just been involved in a ship’s mutiny—Burroughs’ favorite literary calamity, evidently—and are now marooned in Tarzan’s very parish.

above the ears, speaking bluntly, the boy is strictly tapioca.

To synopsize this kind of ectoplasmic yarn with any degree of fidelity would be to connive at criminal boredom, and I have no intention of doing so, but it might be fruitful to dip a spoon into the curry at random to gain some notion of its flavor.

Oh, dacoity, though quiescent, is by no means extinct.

And so, in a bittersweet dying fall that combines echoes of Havre de Grace, Jergens Lotion, and the code of a Yale gentleman, is born the romance of Joan Converse, occupation hamadryad, and Jeffrey Dwyer, jongleur and centaur.

Since Wife of the Centaur is the tale of a sensitive boy who grows up to be a poet, it quite properly begins with a salvo of rapturous and yeasty verse to help you adjust your emotional sights.

The culmination of Wife of the Centaur may be one of the mildest in letters, but I was never so glad to see a culmination in my life.

Accordingly, I downed twenty pages of Thomas Merton, the spiritual equivalent of sulphur and molasses, listened to Jan Peerce’s superbly emetic recording of “What Is a Boy?” and topped it off with a matinée of Way Down East at the Museum of Modern Art.

Way Down East, billed in its opening title as “a simple story for plain people” (the adjectives would seem to be interchangeable), starts off with a windy hundred-and-twenty-two-word essay containing far less juice than pulp and seeds.

Not content with barging into a busy law office and disrupting its routine, she then runs home and poisons a child’s mind against its father.