Perelman Quotes & Sayings

Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park having dinner with Ellen Barkin and Ron Perelman ... Right now, I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you up for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep ... I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta ... And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, "Who I Love" is every last one. I am every last one. People ask of me: Where are you? Where are you? ... Verily I ask of you to ask yourself: Where are you? Where are you? — Stephen Adly Guirgis

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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. — S.J Perelman

Imagine (if you dare) a whimsical marriage of Lord Dunsany and S.J. Perelman, and you have something approaching the tales of Rhys Hughes, filled with gaudy colour, slapstick, puns, fantastic creatures, and the occasional unexpected chill. Hughes' world is a magical one - and his language if the most magical thing of all. — T.E.D. Klein

If someone comes into your house and does fked-up things to your kids and your wife, you're going to be capable of things you never imagined. Because it's in there. It might be lying dormant, but it's there. — Ronald Perelman

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. — Judith Perelman Rossner

If they need my C.V., they don't know my work. — Grigori 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. — S.J Perelman

Some people spend their lives failing and never notice. — Judith Perelman Rossner

The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people - including my ex-wives. — Ronald 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 — William Zinsser

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

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck. — S.J Perelman

There is such a thing as too much couth. — S.J Perelman

Once I decide to take on a role it's because I find that guy to be really interesting to watch and very compelling to play. And from that point on I can no longer judge him. I can only take on his point of view in order to play him effectively. And his point of view is often not mine. — Ronald Perelman

The main obligation is to amuse yourself. — S.J Perelman

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. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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. — S.J Perelman

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 loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money. — S.J Perelman

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. — 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

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

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. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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. — S.J Perelman

One can indeed try to obtain a particular result either by the use of violence or by speech aimed at securing the adherence of minds. It is in terms of this alternative that the opposition between spiritual freedom and constraint is most clearly seen. The use of argumentation implies that one has renounced resorting to force alone, that value is attached to gaining the adherence of one's interlocutor by means of reasoned persuasion, and that one is not regarding him as an object, but appealing to his free judgment. Recourse to argumentation assumes the establishment of a community of minds, which, while it lasts, excludes the use of violence. — Chaim Perelman

Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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

And so I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it's my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place and an enormous sense of stability. — Ronald Perelman

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

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests. — Judith Perelman Rossner

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general. — Ronald 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. — 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

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

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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

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. — Ronald Perelman

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

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. — 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

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

Reality can easily become the current fantasy ... — Judith Perelman Rossner

I found the pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester. — S.J Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. — Grigori 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 a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws. — S.J Perelman

Any time there's a lot of pressure, it's life and death, you go toward this very dark kind of humor. Soldiers do it. Cops do it. — Ronald Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

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? — Judith Perelman Rossner

I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it's my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place. — Ronald Perelman

I was the night foreman of a galvanizing factory, which is hot and smelly and dirty and miserable. — Ronald 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

We old roosters must be cautious. Don't try to outwit your arteries. — S.J Perelman

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. — Ronald Perelman

But we're not God. We're humans, and at the end of the day we have to march to the beat of a certain kind of drum. And if you step outside too far into thinking you're some sort of deity that can transcend law and order, then you've crossed a line. — Ronald Perelman

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

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 had a hell of a time getting here, brother," I revealed when we had finished trading insincerities. — S.J Perelman

Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed . — Grigori Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

As for consulting a dentist regularly, my punctuality practically amounted to a fetish. Every twelve years I would drop whatever I was doing and allow wild Caucasian ponies to drag me to a reputable orthodontist. — S.J Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere. — S.J Perelman

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? — Grigori Perelman

I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse. — S.J Perelman

Clearing up a little misunderstanding is important before things get really messy. — Helen Perelman

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. — S.J Perelman

Music plays a very important role in my life. I'm a frustrated musician. I play the drums. — Ronald Perelman

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found. — Judith Perelman Rossner

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

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

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. — 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

If I want to read S.J. Perelman's Chicken Inspector No. 23 for the third time instead of some anguished, politically correct saga of a girl growing up in a trailer park in Kingman, Arizona, with an alcoholic mother who makes her straighten her naturally curly hair and won't let her date a Navajo boy or pursue her goal of becoming (naturally) a writer, I will. And I will laugh like a lunatic while doing it. — Mel White

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

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. — S.J Perelman