This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them.

"Excuse my dust." - Dorothy Parker's epitaph

It's a small apartment, I've barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end -- I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

She ran the gamut of emotions from 'A' to 'B'

The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Cheque Enclosed."

If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

A girl's best friend is her mutter.

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!

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Young man to Dorothy Parker: "I can't bear fools."
Dorothy Parker to young man: "Funny, your mother could."

"Are you Dorothy Parker?" a guest at a party inquired.
"Yes, do you mind?"

You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.

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

How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the nightlight. 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.

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

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

On learning that Calvin Coolidge was dead she remarked,
"How could they tell?"

In 1925, Harold Ross was struggling to keep The New Yorker magazine alive with a tiny, inexperienced staff and an office with one typewriter.Running into Dorothy, Ross said, "I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week. What happened?"
Dorothy replied, "Somebody was using the pencil."

I can't write five words but that I change seven.

In the street once Dorothy approached a taxi.
"I'm engaged," the cabbie said.
"Then be happy," she told him.

Look at him, a rhinestone in the rough.

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

His body has gone to his head.

Of the play "The House Beautiful":
"The House Beautiful is The Play Lousy."

He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.

I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be a darling at it.

The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

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

I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

Scratch an actor and find an actress.

Hemingway avoids New York, for he has the most valuable asset an artist can possess - the fear of what he knows is bad for him.

Everything that isn't writing is fun.

Under interrogation by the FBI: Listen, I can't even get my dog to stay down. Do I look like someone who could overthrow the government?

Did I enjoy the party? One more drink and I would have been under the host.

I really can't be expected to drop everything and start counting sheep at my age. I hate sheep.

I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.

In a New Yorker review of A.A. Milne's "House at Pooh Corner":
"Tonstant weader fwowed up."

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

If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me...

Ms. Parker's response to her editor's complaints over a late piece:
"Too fucking busy, and vice versa."

In a review of a book by Margot Asquith:
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

To Mrs Sherwood on the arrival of her baby:
"Good work, Mary,'' our Mrs Parker wired collect. "We all knew you had it in you.''

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

Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

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

As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.

I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.

People are more fun than anybody.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

They come clean with the news that war is a horrible thing, that injustice still exists in many parts of the globe even to this day, that the very rich are apt to sit appreciably prettier than the very poor. Even the tenderer matters are not smeared over with romance for them. They have taken a calm look at this marriage thing and they are there to report that it is not always a life long trip to Niagara Falls. You will be barely able to stagger when the evening is over. In fact, once you have heard the boys settling things it will be no surprise to you if any day now one of them works it all out that there is nothing to this Santa Claus idea.

See the happy moron, He doesn't give a damn. I wish I were a moron, My God! Perhaps I am!

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

If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.

It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.

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.

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.

She looks like something that would eat it's young.

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

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

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...

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.

I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. "Out there," I called it.

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.

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.

My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks to those about him, and never even misses them. . . . He can take you to a bicycle race and make it raise your hair.

Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so.

This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.

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

... as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.

A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.

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.

There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

[We look like] a road company of the Last Supper.

His ignorance was an Empire State Building of ignorance. You had to admire it for its size.

Oh, don't worry about Alan . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.

Outspoken by whom?

Someone told Dorothy that Clair Boothe Luce was even kind to her inferiors; Parker replied "Where does she find them?"

Suggested for her tombstone:
This is on me.