“If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be…” — Dorothy Parker

“If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.”

Insisting that serious writing demands the fullest effort a writer can give · Interview, The Paris Review, 1956

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Dorothy Parker

About Dorothy Parker

22 August 1893–7 June 1967

Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on 22 August 1893 and dead on 7 June 1967, became one of the most recognizable voices of twentieth-century American letters: a poet of compressed heartbreak, a theater and book critic of dangerous precision, a short-story writer of unusual psychological acuity, a screenwriter…

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