Quote

Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.

Dorothy Parker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Genius
Talent
Write
Stationery
Back
Envelopes
Writing
Finest
Requires
Available
Mere

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

Image
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
Image
Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray
Dorothy Parker
Image
I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
Dorothy Parker
Image
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
Dorothy Parker
Image
I hate writing, I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
Image
Money is only congealed snow.
Dorothy Parker
Image
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.
Dorothy Parker
Image
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
Image
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.
Dorothy Parker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy 'shedule':] I think you're full of skit.
Dorothy Parker
Image
Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman.
Dorothy Parker
Image
Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.
Dorothy Parker
Image
Where unwilling dies the rose buds the new another year.
Dorothy Parker
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
Dorothy Parker
Image
The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.
Dorothy Parker
Image
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