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I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

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
Seven
Five
Words
Write
Change
Writing
Rewriting
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More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.
Dorothy Parker
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The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.
Dorothy Parker
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A girl's best friend is her mutter.
Dorothy Parker
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There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
Dorothy Parker
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[Epitaph:] Involved in a plot.
Dorothy Parker
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If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit We all assume that Oscar said it.
Dorothy Parker
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... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Dorothy Parker
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His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.
Dorothy Parker
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There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.
Dorothy Parker
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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song
Dorothy Parker
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If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them.
Dorothy Parker
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The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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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
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He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.
Dorothy Parker
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The House Beautiful is the play lousy.
Dorothy Parker
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The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
Dorothy Parker
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[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.
Dorothy Parker
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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?
Dorothy Parker
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I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.
Dorothy Parker