Dorothy Parker quotes:

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.

Writing well is the best revenge.

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

[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.

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

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

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.

What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.

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.

Art is a form of catharsis.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.

When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.

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.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled - Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world - And I wish I'd never met him.

I don't know, she said. We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.

Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league."

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

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.

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.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

The only dependable law of life - everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

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.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? A: You can't hear an enzyme.

[On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that's much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.

I shudder at the thought of men.... I'm due to fall in love again

[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

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.

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.

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

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them

I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I'm under the table, after four I'm under my host.

All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

[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 ...

Guido Natso is natso guido.

The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.

I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

Speech to American Horticultural Society; when challenged to use horticulture in a sentence: You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

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.

Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

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

If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

I like to have a martini, Two at the very most.

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.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

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.

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.

[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.

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.

Woman wants monogamy; Man delights in novelty. Love is woman's moon and sun; Man has other forms of fun. Woman lives but in her lord; Count to ten, and man is bored. With this the gist and sum of it, What earthly good can come of it?

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

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

I give her sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain.

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.

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.

It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

[After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.

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.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

If all the young ladies who attended the Yale promenade dance were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised.

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

ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

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.

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie

If I didn't care for fun and such,I'd probably amount to much.But I shall stay the way I am,Because I do not give a damn.

I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

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.

In youth, it was a way I had,To do my best to please.And change, with every passing ladTo suit his theories.But now I know the things I knowAnd do the things I do,And if you do not like me so,To hell, my love, with you.

I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.

This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."[Women Know Everything!]

The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.

Inventory:"Four be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

By the time you swear you're his,Shivering and sighing.And he vows his passion is,Infinite, undying.Lady make note of this --One of you is lying.

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 :)

But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.

If wild my breast and sore my pride,I bask in dreams of suicide,If cool my heart and high my headI think 'How lucky are the dead.

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.