Dorothy Parker Quotes

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

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

I hate writing. I love having written.

Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.

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

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

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

People are more fun than anybody.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Excuse my dust.

It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes. I can’t stand messes. I’m not being a smartcracker. You know I’m not when you meet me—don’t you, honey?

Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are. I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. “Out there,” I called 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.

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.

Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

Parker: Need of money, dear.

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

[Mr. Benchley] and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.