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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
Writing
Rewriting
Revision
Seven
Five
Words
Write
Change

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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I give her sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain.
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Some men break your heart in two, Some men fawn and flatter, Some men never look at you And that cleans up the matter.
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Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.
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Guido Natso is natso guido.
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When I was young and bold and strong, The right was right, the wrong was wrong. With plume on high and flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. But now I’m old - and good and bad, Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say the world is so, And wise is s/he who lets it go.
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I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
Dorothy Parker
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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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Where's the man could ease a heart Like a satin gown?
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There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
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I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
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What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
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At birth the Devil touched my tongue.
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Don't look at me in that tone of voice.
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.
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Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker
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Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
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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Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
Dorothy Parker
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[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.
Dorothy Parker
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[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
Dorothy Parker