Dorothy Parker Quotes

Katharine Hepburn delivered a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.

If you arrive late, you won't know what anything is about, and if you are there all the way from the beginning, you won't care. <small>p. 277</small>

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

If the English version is in what, in our youth, we used to speak of affectionately as dear old iambic pentameter, the actors mercifully abstain from reciting it that way; they speak their lines as good, hardy prose. <small>p. 76</small>

72 suburbs in search of a city

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host.

Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.

And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs Parker said, she wouldn't be at all surprised.

Van and Schenck put their songs over so skillfully that it isn't until their act is all done that you realize what extremely indifferent songs they are. Now, when John Steel is singing, on the other hand, you are never fooled for a moment. <small>p.153</small>

[On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know? (Coolidge was known as a man who said very few words.)

And I'll stay away from Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.

Rockliffe Fellowes gives a likable performance of the secondary crook's rôle, and there are some decidedly agreeable-looking doughnuts consumed in the first act. And that is about all one can say for Pot Luck. <small>p. 260</small>

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.

I thought that was going to be a good song, too, and then they went and rhymed “time” and “Rhine,” and spoiled everything. <small>p. 24</small>

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.