Jean Hanff Korelitz Quotes & Sayings

Before, mostly for commitment hearings held in a makeshift court — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we're so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don't come with a thunderbolt attached. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Personally, I would love to see every gun on the planet disappear. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

My first three novels were all the subjects of intensely exciting flurries of calls from producers and even stars' production companies, and once someone actually hired a screenwriter to adapt one of my books - but it all came to nothing, so I tried not to get too excited when a Hollywood suitor came calling for 'Admission,' my fourth novel. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

My dog is vicious to the uninvited guest, lavishly affectionate to the invited one, and so freakishly acute that he has mastered the English language. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn't be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?
And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I made it to London aged six, an event I recorded in my diary with coloured markers to convey my sense of occasion. And in 1983, after graduating from college, I returned to spend two years at Cambridge University. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I was 11 years old and horse-obsessed. New York City was an unfortunate place for a girl like me to be growing up. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Every so often in life, you encounter a brilliant idea. Usually, at least in my case, it's somebody else's idea. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Like many people, I have a fascination with lies and the people who tell them. I wouldn't say I've never told a lie, but I don't think I've ever told one without both assuming I would be found out and feeling absolutely rotten about it. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Want of a better idea, she washed her face with the available hand soap and dried — Jean Hanff Korelitz

The implication of AKC registration is that a dog who has it is better than a dog who hasn't. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Did I become a theater person right then, sitting in the Imperial Theater, waiting for the high piccolo note at the start of 'Pippin'? Maybe. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

When you get right down to it, there's something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

And one day she said to me, 'For the rest of my life, it's the first thing they'll say about me when I leave the room.' And I remember thinking: Yes that's true, it will be. But we can't really do anything about what they say when we leave the room. We'll never be able to control that. And we shouldn't try. Our job is just to ... well, be in the room while we're there, and try not to think too much about where we're not. Whatever room we happen to be in, just, be there. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs ... in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Naturally, no march on Washington would be complete without its counter-demonstration. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

A successful birth is not a birth without drugs or monitors or surgery. A successful birth is when you're alive and the baby's alive. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Teammates ... were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C'mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home - the sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

If you're paying attention, if your eyes and your ears and your mind are open, as they should be open. You can know and then, critically, hold on to that knowledge, even if he loves you (or seems to), even if he chooses you (or seems to), even if he promises to make you happy (which no one, not one person on the planet, can possibly do). And part of her, a big part of her, had obviously wanted to be the one who told them this. Because I am such a competent — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I started thinking about what I've always been interested in: how people can't see things that are right in front of them. All you have to do is read the papers to see endless examples of smart people who can't see the nose on their faces. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

The Thames could be thought of as England's longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I'm not in a position to tell anyone anything about how to live his or her life, but I think it's worth noting that no one can lie to us as effectively as we can lie to ourselves. We know exactly what to say! And I do think that women, even extremely smart women, can be very, very vulnerable to men. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Most of all, I am struck by an irony central to the lot of a purebred dog: As it attains the hallmarks of its breed, it seems to simultaneously relinquish its basic dogginess, until it is less a dog than a Pomeranian, Collie or Bloodhound. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

Pacing is not the sort of thing you can plan out beforehand, but you're always aware of it as you write, because you need to make constant decisions. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

To me, respect for human life begins with making it more difficult to obtain an inanimate object that is designed to snuff it out. — Jean Hanff Korelitz