Dorothy Parker

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

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.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead.

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.

Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this -- One of you is lying.

Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928]

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'.

Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour . . . the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul.

This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

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

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song