“You know how a play in dialect is. At the first act, you think, "How quaint!"; at the second act, you wish they would either stop using dialect or keep quiet; and at the third act, you wish you hadn't come.”

— Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014), p. 64

About Dorothy Parker

American poet, critic and satirist, known for sharp wit and for the verse collection 'Enough Rope' (1926).

“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

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

“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me.”

“A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.”

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

“Jealousy. The person who hasn't felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name.”

“If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”

“Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.”

“He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.”