Dorothy Parker on writing

Guns aren’t lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading