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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.

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
Blessed
Verses
Convent
York
Spontaneous
Combustion
Among
Conception
Immaculate
Went
Fell
Sacrament
Children
Suppose
Insistence
Writing
Awful
Fired
Things
Wrote
Hilarious
Finally
Sacraments

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.
Dorothy Parker
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And where does she find them?
Dorothy Parker
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...as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.
Dorothy Parker
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Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray
Dorothy Parker
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I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
Dorothy Parker
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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.
Dorothy Parker
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[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
Dorothy Parker
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Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.
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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I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
Dorothy Parker
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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.
Dorothy Parker
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Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
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.)
Dorothy Parker
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If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
Dorothy Parker
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I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
Dorothy Parker
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The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
Dorothy Parker
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If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark And what if I don't, and what if I do?
Dorothy Parker
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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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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.
Dorothy Parker
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There must be courage there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Dorothy Parker