Dorothy Parker (1893–1967,) née Rothschild, was an American short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and critic who was well-known for her witty remarks, biting prose, and verse satires. She wrote book reviews and short stories for The New Yorker magazine, becoming one of its renowned wits. Her style of spontaneous wit and acerbic criticism has had a lasting influence.
Born in West End, near Long Beach, New Jersey, to Scottish-Jewish parents, Parker never finished high school. She began work in 1916 as a theatre reviewer for Vanity Fair and turned into a book reviewer for The New Yorker in 1927. Her first book of poems, Enough Rope (1927,) became a best-seller; this allowed her to quit her job and work freelance. Parker remained a leading contributor to The New Yorker. She was one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal literary group.
Enough Rope, together with Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931,) was collected in Not So Deep as a Well (1936.) Parker’s short prose pieces printed in Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933) were accumulated in Here Lies (1939.)
Parker also collaborated on several film scripts, including A Star is Born (1937) and The Little Foxes (1941.) Her extraordinary talent for witty epigrams is evident throughout her work.
A lifelong advocate of left-wing causes, Parker worked as a newspaper correspondent in Spain during the civil war. She left her estate to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Dorothy Parker
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
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
And if my heart be scarred and burned, the safer, I, for all I learned.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Experience
Money is only congealed snow.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Snow
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Fashion, Brevity
Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Parties
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?
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: People
There’s a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Words
It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Tragedy
Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, Freckles and doubt.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Love, Doubt
Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Friendship
Where’s the man could ease a heart, like a satin gown?
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Fashion
Oh seek, my love, your newer way;
I’ll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday
Go take your damned tomorrow!
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Procrastination
I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Gossip
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Sorrow, Reflection, Idleness, Friendship
Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Birth, Pregnancy
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Razors pain you; rivers are damp; acids stain you; and drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful; you might as well live.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Suicide
Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Sorrow
Gratitude—the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Gratitude
Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
—Dorothy Parker
You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
Women and elephants never forget.
—Dorothy Parker
I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Wealth
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: “Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Death
I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Men, Man
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Lovers, Love
Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
—Dorothy Parker
Topics: Health
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cornelia Otis Skinner American Actress, Playwright
James Russell Lowell American Poet, Critic
Edwin Markham American Poet
Stanley Kubrick American Film Director
Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
Woody Allen American Film Actor, Director
Mary Oliver American Poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
Kimberly Johnson American Poet
Louise Erdrich American Children’s Books Writer