Dorothy Parker Quotes

The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

[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.

All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.

Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.

Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme -- I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.

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.

All 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.

Then 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.

When you have to apologize, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly.

Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year.

[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.

Once 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.

[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.

Yes, 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.

There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.

As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'.

A girl's best friend is her mutter.

A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose.

You 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.

The 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.

Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.

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.

Don't feel bad when I die; I've been dead for a long time.

This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

Like 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.

[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.

I'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.

Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.

My 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.

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.

This 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.

I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.

Hell's afloat in lover's tears.

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.

The House Beautiful is the play lousy.

Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose.

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.