I’ve always taken exception to that quote. She was a smart woman, but didn’t know everything about guys.
I’ve always loved that she named her pet bird Onan.
That one took me a moment, but it’s a real groaner.
I thought I had one, but when I checked online it turned out to be Ogden Nash. Pity.
“Whoever’s calling can’t be as cute as U.”
(Dorothy Parker was cool!)
Hilarity N. Suze, it’s not true that if someone else said it they would want the attribution. It seems that some of the misattributed Parker lines were made up by other people who thought that they could come up with just as clever a line as Parker could. They then attributed the line to Parker because it would make it more likely for other people to quote it.
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 anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that anymore.
Possibly apocryphal, but very favored, when she came to a doorway the same time as some little tart, the tart gestured she should go first and added “age before beauty.”
Dorothy Parker replied, “Pearls before swine.”
INterestingly, this one came up on my linguist list today.
It first appears in a New Yorker story in 1941. The New YOrker labled it “apocryphal,” which no doubt it is/was.
Luce denied that this ever happened. Not many scholars think it did.
“Four be the things I’d been better without,
Love, curiousity, freckles, and doubt.”
Dorothy Parker has long been a favourite. I actually have a copy of Sunset Gun, which was originally published in 1928, though my copy is the Pocket Books edition from 1940. Anyway, a favourite from that collection:
Thoughts for a Sunshiny Morning
It costs me never a stab nor squirm
To tread by chance upon a worm.
“Aha, my little dear,” I say,
“Your clan will pay me back some day.”
When her husband died a friend came to console her and asked ‘can I get you anything?’ to which Dorothy responded ‘A new husband’. When the friend said that even for her that was tasteless she replied “OK, how about a ham sandwich?”
Doesn’t stand on its own but I love it, and the better quotes are taken.
Until now my favorite funny pet names were from a friend who named one of her cats Peeves. (Peeves playmate was Willie, whose full name was Amazing Grace Slick Willie Nelson Mandela.)
There’s something about that line that almost moves me to tears.
Peeves? thought I. At Hogwarts, Peeves is the owner of a cat, Mrs. Norris…
and then I realized: Ah, so she has pet Peeves.
This is in Bartlett’s Book Of Anecdotes (revised edition) and credited to Lillian Hellman. The friend was a Mrs Jones, a notorious meddler in other peoples’ business, who had liked Alan Campbell (the dead husband) and only pretended to like Mrs Parker (referred to here as ‘Dottie’).
Mrs Jones said, ‘Dottie, tell me, dear, what can I do for you?’
Dottie said, ‘Get me a new husband.’
There was a silence, but before those who would have laughed could laugh, Mrs Jones said, ‘I think that is the most callous and disgusting remark I ever heard in my life.’
Dottie turned to look at her, sighed, and said gently, ‘So sorry. Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye and tell them to hold the mayo.’
This seems appropriate. It’s from a collection of verse, Sunset Gun (1928).
*Oscar Wilde
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.*
Did history record Peeves’ reaction?
As a person for whom most poetry resonates about as strongly as the contents of phone book, I gotta admit that’s pretty touching.
I have a friend who bawls like a baby at almost every poem she reads. I think I’ll send it to her. 
There was the telegram she sent to her friend Mary to congratulate her on her new baby:
“Good work Mary, we knew you had it in you.”
only link I could find
Asked why she hadn’t attended a particular Broadway play, she replied: “I’ve been too fucking busy, and vice versa.”