Quote

[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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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
Letters
Pressing
Minutes
Assure
Least
Button
Five
Buttons
Nurse
Secretary
Hospitalized
Privacy
Undisturbed
Forty
Dictating

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Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.
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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.
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I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
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It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.
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They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.
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The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.
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The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.
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Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour . . . the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul.
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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.
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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.
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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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[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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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.
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[On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that's much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
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Scratch a king and find a fool!
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[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
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[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.
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Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.
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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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My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.
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