[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 ParkerAll I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.
Dorothy ParkerTravel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme -- I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.
Dorothy ParkerThe 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 ParkerAll those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
Dorothy ParkerThen she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.
Dorothy Parker[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.
Dorothy ParkerIf, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.
Dorothy ParkerIf all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Dorothy ParkerEvery year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
Dorothy ParkerOnce I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.
Dorothy Parker[To woman bragging about having kept her husband for seven years:] Don't worry, if you keep him long enough, he'll come back in style.
Dorothy ParkerYes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman.
Dorothy ParkerYou don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
Dorothy ParkerThe nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.
Dorothy ParkerSaid of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.
Dorothy ParkerThe 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 ParkerThis must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.
Dorothy ParkerLike many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
Dorothy Parker[On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.
Dorothy ParkerI'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.
Dorothy ParkerWhy, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.
Dorothy ParkerMy love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
Dorothy ParkerIf 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 ParkerThis is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
Dorothy ParkerI like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.
Dorothy Parker