Dorothy Parker Quotes - Page 12

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

[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.

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

tomorrow's gone-we'll have tonight!

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

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.

Flowers are heaven's masterpiece.

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

Work is the province of cattle.

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.

I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, "How gay 'twould be To hang me from a flowering tree.

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.

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

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

God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.

I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.

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