Genuine, and pinnable to a specific interview: Parker said it to Marion Capron in “The Art of Fiction, No. 13,” published in The Paris Review, Issue 13 (Summer 1956) and later collected in Writers at Work ↗. It was said in English, so no translation stands between you and the wording — only a hyphen, which several printings drop (“wisecracking”).
“There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit” Dorothy Parker, "The Art of Fiction, No. 13," interview by Marion Capron, The Paris Review no. 13 (Summer 1956). Verified via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Dorothy Parker — American poet, critic & screenwriter; founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Theme: "There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source, in full
Interview
The Art of Fiction, No. 13
Interviewer
Marion Capron
First published
The Paris Review, Issue 13, Summer 1956
Collected in
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (1958)
INTERVIEWER. You have an extensive reputation as a wit. Has this interfered, do you think, with your acceptance as a serious writer?
PARKER. I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. … A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Interview, 1956
The two-sentence quotation is confirmed independently by Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ and WIST ↗. The surrounding question and the “smartcracker” sentence come from an online reproduction of the interview ↗, which prints “wisecracking” without the hyphen; the ellipsis marks two sentences cut from the middle of Parker’s answer.
Specialist check.Wikiquote’s Dorothy Parker page ↗ carries the full two-sentence quotation in its sourced Quotes section, cited to “Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)” — not under Misattributed and not under Disputed.
The bibliographic citation.WIST Quotations ↗ gives the source as Interview (1956, Summer), “The Art of Fiction, No. 13,” by Marion Capron, The Paris Review, Issue 13, and records that it was collected in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (1958).
The line in situ. An online reproduction of the interview ↗ shows the sentence as Parker’s answer to a question about her reputation as a wit, immediately after she rejects the labels “humorist” and “smartcracker.” It prints the word unhyphenated.
The company it keeps.Quote Investigator ↗ documents Parker as a standing magnet for quips she never made — which is exactly why a Parker line that can be pinned to an issue and an interviewer is worth pinning.
The words come from an interview first published in The Paris Review, Issue 13, in the summer of 1956 — well after the 1931 threshold that governs public-domain status in the United States — so the text is in copyright, not public domain. Rights sit with The Paris Review as first publisher and with Parker’s literary estate, which she bequeathed to Martin Luther King Jr. and, upon King’s death, to the NAACP ↗. Quoting the sentence with attribution, as here, is ordinary citation; reproducing the interview at length is not.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What actually goes wrong with this one
Nothing here is misattributed — the line really is Parker’s, and it sits in a sourced section rather than a disputed one. What travels badly is the wording, the truncation, and the company the quotation keeps.
The half most people meet ends at “… and wit,” dropping the sentence that supplies the criterion. WIST records the quotation as the second sentence ↗ — “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words” — which is where the argument actually lives.
~
The wider patternDorothy Parker, quote magnet context
Parker is one of the most over-credited names in English. Quote Investigator ↗ documents commentators of the 1930s and 1940s complaining that every New York wisecrack got hung on her, and Parker herself conceding in 1941 that she had not originated most of them. Even the celebrated protest line — “Everything I’ve ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker,” ascribed to George S. Kaufman — is shaky: QI traces it to Scott Meredith’s 1974 biography, more than a decade after Kaufman’s death in 1961, with no earlier primary documentation.
✓This one survives the scrutiny. The line was given to Marion Capron and published in The Paris Review, Issue 13, Summer 1956, and Wikiquote carries it in its sourced section ↗ — and it is, pointedly, Parker objecting to being called a wisecracker.
Context
It is a complaint, not a boast
The line is almost always quoted as Dorothy Parker being clever about cleverness. In the interview it is the opposite: a writer pushing back. Marion Capron had just asked whether her extensive reputation as a wit had got in the way of her being accepted as a serious writer, and Parker’s answer opens by refusing the category outright — she does not want to be classed as a humorist, and the label “smartcracker” makes her, in her words, sick and unhappy.
The distinction she then draws is doing real work. Wisecracking is a performance skill — timing, symmetry, a word turned over at speed. Wit, on her account, has to be about something true. That is a standard she is applying to herself, and it is a harsher one than her public reputation ever asked of her.
Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Why the one-sentence version loses the argument
The quotation circulates almost everywhere as a single sentence: There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. On its own that is a claim without a criterion — it asserts a gap and never says what fills it.
The second sentence is the whole argument. WIST files the quotation under that second sentence ↗ rather than the first, which is a fair editorial judgement: “wit has truth in it” is the test, and “calisthenics with words” is the verdict on what fails it.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1893–1967 · American poet, critic & screenwriter; founding member of the Algonquin Round Table
Dorothy Parker (born 22 August 1893, died 7 June 1967) was an American poet, short-story writer, critic and screenwriter, and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table — the New York lunch circle whose reputation for repartee she spent much of her later life trying to shrug off. Her verse and stories are compressed, unsentimental and often savage, and she twice earned Academy Award nominations for screenwriting. She left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and, on his death, to the NAACP — a bequest that still surprises readers who know her only as a dispenser of one-liners.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Dorothy Parker, "The Art of Fiction, No. 13," interview by Marion Capron, The Paris Review, no. 13 (Summer 1956); collected in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (1958).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/theres-a-hell-of-a-distance-between-wise-cracking-and-wit/