Dorothy Parker Quotes

Guido Natso is natso guido.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

Some men break your heart in two, Some men fawn and flatter, Some men never look at you; And that cleans up the matter.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.

Art is a form of catharsis.

I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

[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.

Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous.

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

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.

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.

Work is the province of cattle.

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

And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song

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.

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

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.

Money is only congealed snow.

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

Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and say they lie.

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

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

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

For a few minutes, everything is so cute that the mind reels.... And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself.

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

[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was 'outspoken':] By whom?

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

Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.

Hell's afloat in lover's tears.

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.

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?

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

On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?

Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn't a very good anecdote. I'm better at animal stories.

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

Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

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

tomorrow's gone-we'll have tonight!

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

Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.

At birth the Devil touched my tongue.

Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.