Quotes from Dorothy Parker

He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.

Work is the province of cattle.

[After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, 'Age before beauty':] Pearls before swine.

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.

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

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.

If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them.

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.

Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.

Writing well is the best revenge.

The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?

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.

She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose.

Sometimes I think Ill give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.

Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.

Poisons pain you Rivers are damp Acid stains you And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful Nooses give Gas smells awful You might as well live.

It cost me never a stab nor squirm To tread by chance upon a worm. 'Aha my little dear' I say 'Your clan will pay me back one day.'

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

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

If I didn't care for fun and such, I'd probably amount to much. But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn.

Then if my friendships break and bend, There's little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tires.

It was written without fear and without research.