APB-SAL is a blog about education, science, science education, fiction, science fiction, literature, literary stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes the blogger's fancy. NOTE: This blog interrogates art. It rarely make moral proclamations. For that attend the church or politician of your choice. This blog concerns aesthetics, not propaganda. Consider this as interviews with books where the interviewer presents interviewees, so you get what you need to do your own thinking.
"It’s easier to write about those you hate--just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book."-- Dorothy Parker in an interview with Paris Review
"I don’t want to be classed as a humorist.... I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist.... There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
"[Satire’s] another matter. They’re the big boys. If I’d been called a satirist there’d be no living with me. But by satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists.... Lord knows, a writer should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow. -- Not like Thurber and Mr. Benchley. Those two were damn well-read and, though I hate the word, they were cultured. What sets them apart is that they both had a point of view to express. That is important to all good writing. It’s the difference between Paddy Chayefsky, who just puts down lines, and Clifford Odets, who in his early plays not only sees but has a point of view. The writer must be aware of life around him."
"It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence--no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven."-- Dorothy Parker in an interview with Paris Review
"The telephone book and from the obituary columns."-- Dorothy Parker in an interview with Paris Review
"My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated--as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture."-- Dorothy Parker in an interview with Paris Review
"[N]arrative stories are the best, though my past stories make themselves stories by telling themselves through what people say. I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things. But I’m not going to do those he-said, she-said things anymore, they’re over, honey, they’re over."-- Dorothy Parker in an interview with Paris Review
