Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

The earliest located appearance is a January 1959 filler item in the Liverpool Echo (UK) printed under a small heading and attributed to Dorothy Parker, but without any indication of where Parker supposedly said or wrote it. The line was then reprinted in other venues and later entered quotation anthologies, which helped it spread, yet no primary-source occurrence in Parker’s own published work or recorded interviews is provided in the article text.

The remark uses dark humor to contrast the limits of wealth with the desire for comfort and luxury even in illness: money may not restore health, but it can still buy a more glamorous way of coping with disability.