Dorothy Parker Quotes - Page 10

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

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.

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

Everybody's got their troubles.

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

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.

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.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

Men They hail you as their morning star Because you are the way you are. If you return the sentiment, They'll try to make you different; And once they have you, safe and sound, They want to change you all around. Your moods and ways they put a curse on; They'd make of you another person. They cannot let you go your gait; They influence and educate. They'd alter all that they admired. They make me sick, they make me tired.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

Art is a form of catharsis.

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

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.

[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.

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.

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man that solicits insurance!

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.