Quote

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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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
Writer
Vacancy
Way
Professions
Would
Gracious
Cleaning
Rough
Profession
Lonely
Choose
Vacancies

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

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If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.
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I won't telephone him. I'll never telephone him again as long as I live. He'll rot in hell, before I'll call him up. You don't have to give me strength, God I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I'm waiting here. He's so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.
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Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.
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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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[Requesting her epitaph to read this way:] Excuse my dust.
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If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
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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.
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My land is bare of chattering folk / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
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Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
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This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
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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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It's not the tragedies that kill us it's the messes.
Dorothy Parker
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Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.
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We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or 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.)
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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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.
Dorothy Parker
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And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.
Dorothy Parker
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A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.
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ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
Dorothy Parker