Dorothy Parker Quotes

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.

[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.

You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.

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.

[On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man that solicits insurance!

Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.

There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

Money was made, not to command our will, But all our lawful pleasures to fulfill. Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey; The horse doth with the horseman away.

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

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.

Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.

If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don't, and what if I do?

What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, And pristine is my hat My dress is 1922… My life is all like that.

Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad. Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you-- And if that makes you happy, kid, You'll be the first it ever did.

Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.

Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed— I think they would be better dead.

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.

[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.

(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.

I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

all men are the same age.

God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

It was written without fear and without research.

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour . . . the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul.

Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.

Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.

Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.

Writing well is the best revenge.

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.

Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.

...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.

Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? A: You can't hear an enzyme.

Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.