Dorothy Parker Quotes

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

I don't read my reviews. Unless I'm unfortunate enough to catch something by accident, which happens, and it's always a bad review. Always, it's amazing. I will be sitting in a café, and I will open a random paper right to the page of the review.... And then you're sucked in and go home and never want to go out again.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

Yes, design can make you happy.

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.

Loss aversion is a really disproportionate anxiety about stuff that doesn't matter very much. So for instance, if you lose $5, you feel really bad about the $5 you've lost. You're cursing yourself. You're going through it again and again. If, on the other hand, you find $5, you go - hey, great, five bucks. And you've forgotten about it really quickly.

You must be careful when you ask people whether they’re happy; it’s a question that can upset them a great deal.

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.

Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth.

I don't think people need to know much about me to understand the book, or to enjoy it. The book stands by itself. Over the last several years, my life has been all about writing these books, but the books aren't about my life.

What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.

Criticism will plant FEAR in the human heart, or resentment, but it will not build love or affection.

I write to entertain. When people read one of my books I want them to finish with a smile on their faces, feeling a little bit better about themselves and the people in their lives.

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

So it's nice to know that Rita had that impact, and it was nice to end a character on a high note like that. But, again, in the moment... I always say, nobody was more devastated than me [from Rita's death in Dexter]!

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?