Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.
I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.
The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints. . . So far I've had no complaints.
I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament. . . I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
[On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents.
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 :)
Now I know the things I know, and I do the things I do; and if you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you!
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven.
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.
Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
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.
Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.
Don't look at me in that tone of voice.
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.
My land is bare of chattering folk; the clouds are low along the ridges, and sweet's the air with curly smoke from all my burning bridges.