Dorothy Parker Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Reading, Beer

  Quoted in The AlgonquinWits, ed. Robert E. Drennan (1968)

• I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

  Dorothy Parker

  Running, Book, Hands

• It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

  Dorothy Parker

  Hate, Book, Writing

  Dorothy Parker, Stuart Y. Silverstein (2009). “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

• This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

  Dorothy Parker

  Funny, Book, Reading

  Dorothy Parker, Stuart Y. Silverstein (2009). “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

• 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.

  Dorothy Parker

  Jobs, Book, Reading

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

• I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?

  Dorothy Parker

  Hurt, Lying, Book

  Dorothy Parker (2002). “Complete Stories”, p.80, Penguin

• I'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Home, Men

  Dorothy Parker (1936). “Not So Deep as a Well”, Macmillan Company of Canada

• The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Tired, Nurse

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

• His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.

  Dorothy Parker

  Powerful, Book, May

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

• Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Numbers, Gone

• 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.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Thinking, Two

• Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Home, Lazy

• ... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  Dorothy Parker

  Children, Book, Reading

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

• Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Enough, Life Happiness

• I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Reading, Cutting

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

• [On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Character, Ice

  Dorothy Parker (2004). “Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words”, Taylor Trade Publishing

• [On Lou Tellegen's Women Have Been Kind:] The book ... has all the elegance of a quirked little finger and all the glitter of a pair of new rubbers.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Glitter, Littles

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