Top 316 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy Parker - Page 6

People are more than fun than anybody.

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

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.

Now that you've got me right down to it, the only thing I didn't like about The Barrets of Wimplole Street was the play.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man that solicits insurance!

Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you.

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.

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

[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.

And where does she find them?

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

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.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

Money was made, not to command our will, But all our lawful pleasures to fulfill. Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey; The horse doth with the horseman away.

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.