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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.

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
Good
Brave
Sake
Taste
Away
Enough
Tentacles
Must
Chop
Great
Clinging
Work
Author

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I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
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On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?
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The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.
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Flowers are heaven's masterpiece.
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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.
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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?
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You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
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And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.
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[On Lou Tellegen's Women Have Been Kind:] The book ... has all the elegance of a quirked little finger and all the glitter of a pair of new rubbers.
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Now I know the things I know, and I do the things I do and if you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you!
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All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
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Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.
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My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.
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[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.
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Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.
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But I don't give up I forget why not.
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Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)
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Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
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Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.
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All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
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