# Quote — Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

> The Big Personalities weighed in. Soon after its publication Irwin Shaw wrote to me praising it. Terry Southern, calling me "Miss Smarts," said I was "a perfect darling." Gore Vidal phoned one morning saying, "You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go." Ernest Hemingway said to me, "I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speak differently." And then added, "My characters all sound the same because I never listen." All this, and heaven too. Laurence Olivier told me that now that my book was making a lot of money we could elope and I could support us. The Financial Times ran an item which read, "Such and such stock: No dud avocado." Groucho Marx wrote me, "I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado.… If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." When people ask me how autobiographical the book is I say, all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.

- Author: [Elaine Dundy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy.md)
- Book: [The Dud Avocado](https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elaine_Dundy#Afterword_to_The_Dud_Avocado_(2006)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/the-big-personalities

## More from this book

> Slowly his eyes left my hair and traveled downwards. This time he really took in my outfit and then that Look that I’m always encountering; that special one composed in equal parts of amusement, astonishment and horror came over his face.
>
> I am not a moron and I can generally guess what causes this look. The trouble is, it’s always something different.
>
> I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling his eyes bearing down on my bare shoulders and breasts.
>
> "What the hell are you doing in the middle of the morning with an evening dress on?” he asked me finally.
>
> "Sorry about that,” I said quickly, "but it’s all I’ve got to wear. My laundry hasn’t come back yet.”

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/slowly-his-eyes.md)

> Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t. I’m positive of that.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/ridiculous-as-the.md)

> The sun shone on: the shade of the awning vanished in the hot, white, shadowless midday. In that blaze of heat I was loving Paris as never before.
>
> And there sitting opposite me, stretching himself luxuriously in the sun, his eyes lazily examining his half-empty drink, was Larry, the one I loved the best … sensationally uninterested.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/the-sun-shone.md)