Dorothy Parker Quotes

Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.

I've finally gotten to the bottom of things.

Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.

If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.

And where does she find them?

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.

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.

When I was young and bold and strong, The right was right, the wrong was wrong. With plume on high and flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. But now I’m old - and good and bad, Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say the world is so, And wise is s/he who lets it go.

ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

People are more than fun than anybody.

Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

They tire of quiet, that have known the storm

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.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.

Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.

Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty.

What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.

I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.

[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.

Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.

Guido Natso is natso guido.

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.

Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?

I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.

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?

[Epitaph:] Involved in a plot.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.

Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.

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.

I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.

[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

Trapped like a trap in a trap