Quotes from S.J. Perelman

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.

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.

You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll beworking pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock.