Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force

Not Dorothy Parker — actually Bill Miller Bill Miller American newspaper columnist and boxing publicist · published To You I Tell It in 1929
Disputed Free to reuse

The joke first appears in To You I Tell It (1929), a self-published book by the columnist and boxing publicist Bill Miller, among a set of deliberately absurd mock endorsements. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Miller wrote all of those blurbs himself and coined this one; Dorothy Parker’s name was attached to it decades later, in 1962, with no citation attached.

Last verified 15 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force” Bill Miller, To You I Tell It (1929); widely misattributed to Dorothy Parker. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Should be thrown with great force.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Dorothy Parker. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Bill Miller — active 1920s. Theme: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Origin
Bill Miller, To You I Tell It (1929)
Credit printed in that book
Frank Dolan — a joke attribution
First credited to Parker
1962, in Bennett Cerf’s syndicated column
Familiar modern wording
The Algonquin Wits (1968), ed. Robert E. Drennan

FRANK DOLAN, New York— Not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Should be thrown with great force.

The blurb as printed in Miller’s 1929 book, transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗. The credit to Frank Dolan is part of the joke: a December 1929 review by the sports columnist Frank MacDonell stated plainly that Miller “wrote the recommendations himself”.

Quote Investigator: “It Should Be Thrown With Great Force”

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s investigation ↗ gives the earliest known match as 1929, in the self-published To You I Tell It by the newspaper columnist and boxing publicist Bill Miller (William Eli Miller). The book collected mock endorsements “supposedly written by well-known people”; this one was printed over the name of Frank Dolan.
  • That the attributions were fake is not an inference. QI quotes a December 1929 review by the sports columnist Frank MacDonell, which reprints several blurbs and states that Miller “wrote the recommendations himself” — see the citation list ↗. QI credits Bill Miller with originating the remark, crediting researcher Bill Mullins with finding the 1929 book.
  • The path to Parker is documented step by step. In 1958 Sid Ziff quoted the line in the Mirror News of Los Angeles and expressly attributed it to an unnamed critic; Reader’s Digest reprinted it in February 1960 ↗ crediting Ziff, dropping his “one critic said” hedge. In 1962 the publisher Bennett Cerf ↗ printed a reworded version in his syndicated column over Parker’s name, with no citation. QI’s verdict: “there is no substantive evidence that she ever employed it.”
  • The wording most people know today comes from The Algonquin Wits ↗, Robert E. Drennan’s 1968 collection, which listed it in the Dorothy Parker chapter. Wikiquote also files the line under Misattributed ↗, noting that Drennan’s apparent source was a Parker review that does not contain the quote.
Public domain

The 1929 wording shown above is in the public domain in the United States: it was published in Bill Miller’s To You I Tell It in 1929, well before 1931. Note that the familiar modern phrasing — “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly” — is not the 1929 text; it comes from Bennett Cerf’s 1962 column and Robert E. Drennan’s The Algonquin Wits (1968), both of which are modern and in copyright. Reuse the 1929 sentence freely; treat the later rewording as you would any 1960s publication. This is not legal advice.

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

Often misattributed

This is a joke that has been misattributed twice over — once on purpose, as part of the gag, and once by accident, thirty years later.

Dorothy Parker No evidence

Quote Investigator states ↗ that “there is no substantive evidence that she ever employed it”. Her name was attached by Bennett Cerf in a 1962 column with no citation, and multiple researchers have failed to find the joke anywhere in her writings.

Frank Dolan A joke credit

Miller printed the blurb over Dolan’s name as part of the book’s running gag. A December 1929 review by Frank MacDonell, quoted by QI ↗, says Miller wrote all the recommendations himself.

Groucho Marx Also unsourced

In 1975 the columnist Earl Wilson reported the line as Groucho Marx’s remark about a new novel — one more reassignment in QI’s chronology ↗, and no better sourced than Parker’s.

The line is Bill Miller’s, written in 1929 as a fake endorsement of his own book — see Quote Investigator’s full chronology ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

The joke was born already misattributed. Miller’s book printed a page of glowing endorsements from famous names, every one of them invented, and this was the funniest of them — a blurb that insults the book it is advertising. Detached from that page, it stops being a self-deprecating gag and becomes a critic’s kill shot, which is the form in which it travelled.

The rest is a chain of small, ordinary losses. Ziff quoted it in 1958 and said a critic said it; Reader’s Digest reprinted Ziff and dropped the hedge; Cerf supplied a famous name in 1962; Drennan’s 1968 anthology fixed the wording. No one fabricated anything outright. Each step just discarded a qualifier.

The joke was born already misattributed — and that was the point.

Read the full story

The book being insulted is often named as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or as Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress, which Parker did review in 1928. Quote Investigator addresses both: the Mussolini review does not contain the jest, and QI has located no support at all for the Atlas Shrugged claim. The original target was Miller’s own book.

QI credits the researcher Bill Mullins with locating the 1929 book and the December 1929 review that together settled the question, and Sam Clements and Bonnie Taylor-Blake for the 1960 and 1962 citations.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — “It Should Be Thrown With Great Force”quoteinvestigator.com

The full investigation: the 1929 origin, the fake Frank Dolan credit, and the 1962 reassignment to Parker.
Wikiquote — Dorothy Parker (Misattributed)en.wikiquote.org

Files the line as misattributed and notes Drennan’s source does not contain it.
Wikipedia — Dorothy Parkeren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the writer the joke is popularly credited to.
Wikipedia — Bennett Cerfen.wikipedia.org

The Random House publisher and columnist who attached Parker’s name to the joke in 1962.
The Algonquin Wits — Internet Archivearchive.org

A later Citadel Press printing of Drennan’s 1968 collection, the source of the wording used today.
Wikipedia — Algonquin Round Tableen.wikipedia.org

The circle whose collected witticisms became a magnet for unsourced one-liners.

The author

About Bill Miller

Bill Miller

American newspaper columnist and boxing publicist · active 1920s

Bill Miller (William Eli Miller) was an American newspaper columnist and boxing publicist. In 1929 he self-published To You I Tell It and filled its endorsement pages with mock blurbs attributed to well-known writers and sportswriters — all of them, a contemporary reviewer confirmed, written by Miller. One of those invented endorsements outlived the book, the joke and its author, and is now quoted worldwide under somebody else’s name. Little else about him is recorded in the sources we could reach, so we claim no dates for him.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Miller, Bill. To You I Tell It. Self-published, 1929. Blurb printed over the name of Frank Dolan. Origin established by Quote Investigator, “It Should Be Thrown With Great Force,” 26 March 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force’?” Last verified 15 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/this-is-not-a-novel-to-be-tossed-aside-lightly-it-should-be/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied