Jean Kerr Quotes

A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?

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.

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

Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review, it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism, does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

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.

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

... it's impossible to register any emotion without using some muscle which, in time, will produce a wrinkle. ... By the time she is thirty, a starlet has been carefully taught to smile like a dead halibut. The eyes widen, the mouth drops open, but the eye muscles are never involved.

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

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

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.

It takes at least one to make a marriage.

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.

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.

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

I know what I wish Ralph Nader would investigate next. Marriage. It's not safe, it's not safe at all.

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

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).

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

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.

I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.

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

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.

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

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

I will read anything rather than work.

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.

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

There is this to be said about having money. You get rejected by a higher class of people.

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.

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 don't grasp things this early in the day. I mean, I hear voices, all right, but I can't pick out the verbs.

I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.

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.

People only call you 'my dear' when they are irritated with you.