Top 100 Dorothy Parker Quotes
#1. The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
Dorothy Parker
#2. Please don't let me hope, dear God. Please don't. I
Dorothy Parker
#3. All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
Dorothy Parker
#4. The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.
Dorothy Parker
#5. The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.
Dorothy Parker
#6. I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, How gay 'twould be To hang me from a flowering tree.
Dorothy Parker
#7. I give her sadness and the gift of pain,
a new moon madness and a love of rain.
Dorothy Parker
#8. Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can't hear an enzyme.
Dorothy Parker
#9. Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded
wheelchair.
Dorothy Parker
#10. This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.
Dorothy Parker
#12. On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
Dorothy Parker
#13. [After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker
#14. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.
Dorothy Parker
#15. Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.
Dorothy Parker
#16. This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.
Dorothy Parker
#18. Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.
Dorothy Parker
#19. Don't feel bad when I die; I've been dead for a long time.
Dorothy Parker
#21. By the time you swear you're his, shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is infinite,undying-Lady,make a note of this: One of you is lying
Dorothy Parker
#23. Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
Dorothy Parker
#24. When you're awake, all the men go and fall for you -
Sleep, pretty lady, and give me a chance
(From the poem "Lullaby")
Dorothy Parker
#26. [On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker
#27. Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed - I think they would be better dead.
Dorothy Parker
#28. (Scottish Terriers) have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one. And they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only thing fatal to them is being run over by an automobile - in which case the car itself knows it has been in a fight.
Dorothy Parker
#29. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
Dorothy Parker
#30. The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man.
Dorothy Parker
#31. Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.
Dorothy Parker
#33. A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.
Dorothy Parker
#34. I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
Dorothy Parker
#35. All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.
Dorothy Parker
#36. The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!
Dorothy Parker
#37. On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?
Dorothy Parker
#38. The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.
Dorothy Parker
#39. The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?
Dorothy Parker
#40. Honest, I won't ever do it again. I'll go straight, after this. I'll never go to bed again, if I can only sleep now.
Dorothy Parker
#41. Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Dorothy Parker
#42. He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.
Dorothy Parker
#44. Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker
#45. She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.
Dorothy Parker
#46. He and I had an office so tiny, that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.
Dorothy Parker
#47. If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains
Dorothy Parker
#48. [On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents ...
Dorothy Parker
#49. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind ... There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Dorothy Parker
#50. And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And
Dorothy Parker
#51. Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.
Dorothy Parker
#52. For herself, she declared that she paid no attention to her birthdays - didn't give a hoot about them; and it is true that when you have amassed several dozen of the same sort of thing, it loses that rarity which is the excitement of collectors.
Dorothy Parker
#53. My own dear love, he is all my world -
And I wish I'd never met him.
Dorothy Parker
#54. Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.
Dorothy Parker
#55. For a few minutes, everything is so cute that the mind reels ... And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself.
Dorothy Parker
#57. It's easier to write about those you hate - just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.
Dorothy Parker
#58. So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.
Dorothy Parker
#59. I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.
Dorothy Parker
#60. [When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
Dorothy Parker
#62. Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.
Dorothy Parker
#63. And let her loves, when she is dead
Write this above her bones,
No more she lives to give us bread
Who asked her only stones.
Dorothy Parker
#65. It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven.
Dorothy Parker
#66. Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
Dorothy Parker
#69. [From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.
Dorothy Parker
#70. The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
#71. Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.
Dorothy Parker
#73. Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.
Dorothy Parker
#74. They are sad books, filled with sad and skinless people. There are some who do not like such books. The world, too, is crowded with the sorrowful and the sensitive. There are many who do not like such a world.
Dorothy Parker
#75. [On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
Dorothy Parker
#76. I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
Dorothy Parker
#77. The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.
Dorothy Parker
#78. Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.
Dorothy Parker
#79. [Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.
Dorothy Parker
#80. I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.
Dorothy Parker
#81. This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.
Dorothy Parker
#82. Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.
Dorothy Parker
#83. As for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.
Dorothy Parker
#85. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.
Dorothy Parker
#86. My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
Dorothy Parker
#87. My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.
Dorothy Parker
#88. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
Dorothy Parker
#89. Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.
Dorothy Parker
#90. I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.
Dorothy Parker
#91. This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.
[Women Know Everything!]
Dorothy Parker
#92. If I didn't care for fun and such, I'd probably amount to much, but I shall stay the way I am, because I do not give a damn.
Dorothy Parker
#93. People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.
Dorothy Parker
#94. A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.
Dorothy Parker
#96. Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.
Dorothy Parker
#97. That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
Dorothy Parker
#98. I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament ... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
Dorothy Parker
#99. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
Dorothy Parker
#100. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.
Dorothy Parker
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