Dorothy Parker Quotes

Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much.

It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.

Then if my friendships break and bend, There's little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.

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

Scratch a king and find a fool!

The House Beautiful is the play lousy.

Everybody's got their troubles.

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.

I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

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

[To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit.

He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.

Hollywood is one place in the world where you can die of encouragement.

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 Lou Tellegen's Women Have Been Kind:] The book ... has all the elegance of a quirked little finger and all the glitter of a pair of new rubbers.

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.

Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.

If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)

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

People are more fun than anyone.

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.

... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

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

My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.

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

Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.

Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.

Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Trapped like a trap in a trap

Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles' head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn't.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

...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.

[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.

Somebody was using the pencil.

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.

[At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today - including the bride and groom.

Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray

There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.

I've finally gotten to the bottom of things.

My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

Eternity is a ham and two people.

What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

Now that you've got me right down to it, the only thing I didn't like about The Barrets of Wimplole Street was the play.

There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

People are more than fun than anybody.

Just begin a story with such a phrase as 'I remember Disraeli - poor old Dizz! - once saying to me, in answer to my poke in the eye,' and you will find me and Morpheus off in a corner, necking.

Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you.