Dorothy Parker Quotes

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.

It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

I might repeat to myself . . . a list of quotations from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

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 :)

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

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.

I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

[On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?

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.

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.

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.

[Requesting her epitaph to read this way:] Excuse my dust.

Flowers are heaven's masterpiece.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.

Somebody was using the pencil.

The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.

The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!

If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.

Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much.

I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

I don't mind anything that's written about me, as long as it's not true.

[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.

His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good.

Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.

There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Where's the man could ease a heart Like a satin gown?

When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.

Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so.

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I'll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow!

Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray

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.

Scratch a king and find a fool!

The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.

There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.