Dorothy Parker Quotes

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

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

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

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

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

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.

The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.

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

Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

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

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

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.

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

The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Check enclosed."

Excuse my dust.

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

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

Parker: Need of money, dear.

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.

The girl speaks eighteen languages and can't say no in any of them.

I hate writing. I love having written.