Dorothy Parker Quotes

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

People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?

They tire of quiet, that have known the storm

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

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.

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

Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.

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

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

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

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

The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them

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

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

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

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

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

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

She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw — I don't say she will, but she can.

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

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.

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

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

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

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

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

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

all men are the same age.

This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.

I give her sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain.

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

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 don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

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.

Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.

[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.