“The most a lady may do is give him the wrong telephone number.” — Dorothy Parker | V2Melody

“The most a lady may do is give him the wrong telephone number.”

Mocking rigid social etiquette by suggesting a more practical form of self-defence · Book review of Emily Post's Etiquette, The New Yorker, 1927

Joy
Truth

About Dorothy Parker

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…

More by Dorothy Parker

Poems by Dorothy Parker

More remarks by Dorothy Parker

“Don't feel badly when I die. I've been dead for a long time.”

A bleak late-life reflection on isolation and the feeling of having outlived one's own era · Conversation with a friend, later recollected

“There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

Distinguishing genuine wit from merely clever verbal performance · Interview, The Paris Review, 1956

Art
Truth

“He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.”

Turning a memory of cramped working conditions into a characteristic piece of wordplay · Interview, The Paris Review, 1956