Dorothy Parker Quotes

If I had married someone wealthy when I was young, I would have sunk like a stone. Being skint makes life quite clear. You've got to take that job.

My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.

I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.

When you have no money, you need invention.

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

Little Boy Blue... he needed the money!

One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

Heroes come along when you need them.

For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.

When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.

Lack of money always means a surplus of creativity, in the best case.

Money is a necessity; so is dirt.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

I was motivated to join in large part because my family needed the money. I would like to say how patriotic we were, but really what motivated me was the excitement my mother would get in receiving a check for my older brother.

Hunger is the handmaid of genius.

God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? (“Disappearing Act”)

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.

Of the nude pictures: Sure I posed. I needed the money.

Everyone needs money. That's why they call it money