Perelman Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed .

Grigori Perelman

#3. The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

Judith Perelman Rossner

#4. I know how to control the Universe. Why would I run to get a million, tell me?

Grigori Perelman

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

Ronald Perelman

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

S.J Perelman

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I'm half Scotch-Irish on both sides, and when I lose my temper-brother, I go.

S.J Perelman

#13. Some people spend their lives failing and never notice.

Judith Perelman Rossner

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people - including my ex-wives.

Ronald Perelman

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. "In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."

S.J Perelman

#24. 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

#25. We old roosters must be cautious. Don't try to outwit your arteries.

S.J Perelman

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.

S.J Perelman

#29. 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

#30. You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

Ronald Perelman

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Ronald Perelman

#42. There is such a thing as too much couth.

S.J Perelman

#43. Clearing up a little misunderstanding is important before things get really messy.

Helen Perelman

#44. 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

#45. Music plays a very important role in my life. I'm a frustrated musician. I play the drums.

Ronald Perelman

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated.

Grigori Perelman

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

S.J Perelman

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

S.J Perelman

#53. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

Grigori Perelman

#54. 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

#55. The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere.

S.J Perelman

#56. 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

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

S.J Perelman

#58. Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

S.J Perelman

#59. I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.

S.J Perelman

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. If they need my C.V., they don't know my work.

Grigori Perelman

#63. The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

S.J Perelman

#64. He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.

S.J Perelman

#65. 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

#66. I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.

S.J Perelman

#67. Reality can easily become the current fantasy ...

Judith Perelman Rossner

#68. I cannot recall a more engaging passage in fiction, and I've been trying for almost eighteen seconds.

S.J Perelman

#69. 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

#70. A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

Judith Perelman Rossner

#71. 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

#72. I found the pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester.

S.J Perelman