Jean Kerr Quotes

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck.

If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.

That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets.

It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out.

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

The only reason that they say, 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.

Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical.

He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

Some enterprising youth should go from door to door on Christmas morning peddling batteries.

I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.

You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

Movie actors are just ordinary, mixed-up people - with agents.

An actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.

That's deep enough. What do you want --an adorable pancreas?

Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them.

If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs, its just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

I will read anything rather than work.

Being on a ship is something like being pregnant.

You can sit there and do absolutely nothing but stare at the water and have the nicest sense that you are accomplishing something.

Dearer to me than the evening star A Packard car A Hershey bar Or a bride in her rich adorning Dearer than any of these by far Is to lie in bed in the morning

To me having a party is something like having a baby.

The fact that you got through the last one alive is not somehow sufficiently reassuring now.

Children are different - mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they're all a little bit nuts.

In the beginning, we made the usual mistake of looking at houses we could afford. I am working on a proposition, hereafter to be known as Kerr's law, which states in essence: All the houses you can afford to buy are depressing.

I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little.

When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs.

I think if you can write a play, or produce a play, the first step toward success [is] if people don't want to kill themselves in the lobby. Now there must be four or five other steps, but that's the first.

I once truly believed that if I had to stand in line for twenty minutes to have a package gift-wrapped it actually gave the recipient more pleasure.

I'm not so sure it's so civilized to be civilized all the time.

You can't sleep until noon with the proper elan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don't count).

Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theater people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil.

I thought we talked things out!' 'Yes, and you listened very carefully to every word you had to say.

Years ago when a man began to notice that if he stood up on the subway he was immediately replaced by two people, he figured he was getting too fat.

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers. ... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles ... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

Real men don't do pickup lines just to sweep off every girls' feet.

They do and trust their own instincts knowing what the girls' wants and needs. Vying to win their hearts.

It takes at least one to make a marriage.

I was always the last woman on the last down elevator as the store was closing.

I don't grasp things this early in the day.

I mean, I hear voices, all right, but I can't pick out the verbs.

Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if some manufacturer would make a toy as tough, as staunch, as hard to crack open as the carton it comes in!

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

Don't be silly. I'm a mature, intelligent woman. Of course I'm afraid of my mother.

I know what I wish Ralph Nader would investigate next.

Marriage. It's not safe, it's not safe at all.

A man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.