My Virtual Reading Room

Some snippets from "The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker" by Leslie Frewin:

"Happiness is rarely the lot of the searching, contemplative mind and clearly Dorothy Rothschild had precisely that kind of mind, the kind that had a passion for books."

 "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini."

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was famous."--Robert Benchley

Dorothy Parker reviewing plays in her role as a drama critic:

Her ever-so-gentle, sardonic underplaying reached out to the late, benighted Oscar Wilde in her review of his An Ideal Husband:
"Beatrice Beckley has the thankless job of playing Lady Chiltern, one of those frightfully virtuous women of Wilde's who can't utter the simplest observations without dragging in such Sabbatical expressions as 'we needs must'...Somehow, no matter how well done an Oscar Wilde play may be, I am always far more absorbed in the audience than in the drama...they have a conscious exquisiteness...a sort of Crolier-than-thou air.  'Look at us,' they seem to say, 'we are the cognoscenti. We have come because we can appreciate this thing--we are not as you, poor bonehead, who are here because you couldn't get tickets to the Winter Garden...' "