Jean Kerr
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.Collection: Health
I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Moving
Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent.Collection: Hope
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Mom
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.
I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.
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.
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.
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.
A man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.
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.
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.
Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?
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.
When the grandmothers of today hear the word 'Chippendales', they don't necessary think of chairs.
Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living.
I have two trifling ambitions in the theater: to make a lot of people laugh and to make a lot of money.
Affairs have been going on since Tolstoy.
'Lunch Hour' is suitable for a teenager.
It's easier to write about what you know. I wouldn't write about a Wall Street broker, for example.
I'm congenitally vague.
Nobody ever wrote better about domestic things than Robert Benchley.
Some enterprising youth should go from door to door on Christmas morning peddling batteries.Collection: Christmas
I will read anything rather than work.Collection: Knowledge
I'm not so sure it's so civilized to be civilized all the time.Collection: Civilized
If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation.Collection: Lost
People only call you 'my dear' when they are irritated with you.Collection: People
Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.Collection: Drinking
Children are different - mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they're all a little bit nuts.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Baby
Don't be silly. I'm a mature, intelligent woman. Of course I'm afraid of my mother.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Twenties
There is this to be said about having money. You get rejected by a higher class of people.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Water
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.Collection: Depressing
I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Funny Inspirational
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Mirrors
An actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives.Collection: Phones
I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Morning