Top 250 Dorothy Parker Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

202. “Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.”

— Dorothy Parker

203. “Just begin a story with such a phrase as ‘I remember Disraeli – poor old Dizz! – once saying to me, in answer to my poke in the eye,’ and you will find me and Morpheus off in a corner, necking.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

204. “I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”

— Dorothy Parker

205. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

— Dorothy Parker

206. “Their pooled emotions wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.”

— Dorothy Parker

207. “The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.”

— Dorothy Parker

208. “Everybody’s got their troubles.”

— Dorothy Parker

209. “Honest, I won’t ever do it again. I’ll go straight, after this. I’ll never go to bed again, if I can only sleep now.”

— Dorothy Parker

210. “Of Orson Welles: It’s like meeting God without dying.”

— Dorothy Parker

211. “And when it ends, only those places where you have known sorrow are kindly to you. If you revisit the scenes of your happiness, your heart must burst of its agony. And.”

— Dorothy Parker

212. “And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.”

— Dorothy Parker

213. “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.”

— Dorothy Parker

214. “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.”

— Dorothy Parker

215. “Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.”

— Dorothy Parker

216. “Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.”

— Dorothy Parker

217. “Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and say they lie.”

— Dorothy Parker

218. “All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.”

— Dorothy Parker

219. “They say of me, and so they should, It’s doubtful if I come to good.”

— Dorothy Parker

220. “It is that word ‘hunny,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

221. “Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.”

— Dorothy Parker

222. “She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.”

— Dorothy Parker

223. “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

224. “It was written without fear and without research.”

— Dorothy Parker

225. “Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray.”

— Dorothy Parker

226. “The ones I like are ‘cheque’ and ‘enclosed.’”

— Dorothy Parker

227. “Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Book Quotes

228. “Please don’t let me hope, dear God. Please don’t. I.”

— Dorothy Parker

229. “Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching.”

— Dorothy Parker

230. “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

231. “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”

— Dorothy Parker

232. “His books are exciting and powerful and – if I may filch the word from the booksy ones – pulsing.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Book Quotes

233. “I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

234. “Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn...”

— Dorothy Parker

235. “Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.”

— Dorothy Parker

236. “I’m of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Book Quotes

237. “It’s easier to write about those you hate – just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.”

— Dorothy Parker

Featured in: Book Quotes

238. “Authors and actors and artists and such – Never know nothing, and never know much.”

— Dorothy Parker

239. “There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence.”

— Dorothy Parker

240. “I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”

— Dorothy Parker

241. “And I’ll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.”

— Dorothy Parker

242. “When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.”

— Dorothy Parker

243. “You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.”

— Dorothy Parker

244. “There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.”

— Dorothy Parker

245. “There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.”

— Dorothy Parker

246. “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

247. “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

248. “But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder – oh, what will you think of me – if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.”

— Dorothy Parker

249. “Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.”

— Dorothy Parker

250. “Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”

— Dorothy Parker