Jean Kerr Quotes

It takes at least one to make a marriage.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The real menace in dealing with a 5-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a 5-year-old.

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.

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

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 home, but it doesn't always go with everything in the house.

The thing that worries me is that I'm so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature - well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, 'Well, that's a nice-looking oak,' but it doesn't change my way of life.
Now I'm not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I'm the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.