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If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.
Dorothy Parker
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Dorothy Parker
Age: 73 †
Born: 1893
Born: August 22
Died: 1967
Died: June 7
Columnist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
West End
Monmouth County
New Jersey
Dorothy Rothschild
Dot Rothschild
Dottie Rothschild
Facts
Best
Writing
Going
Kills
Pretend
Fact
Write
More quotes by Dorothy Parker
The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?
Dorothy Parker
Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.
Dorothy Parker
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.
Dorothy Parker
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
Dorothy Parker
Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.
Dorothy Parker
There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.
Dorothy Parker
I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.
Dorothy Parker
[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.
Dorothy Parker
This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
Dorothy Parker
On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
Dorothy Parker
Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.
Dorothy Parker
I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.
Dorothy Parker
[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.
Dorothy Parker
On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?
Dorothy Parker
I hate writing, I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.
Dorothy Parker
Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? A: You can't hear an enzyme.
Dorothy Parker
Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker
I give her sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain.
Dorothy Parker
[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
Dorothy Parker