Jean Kerr Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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! — Jean Kerr

Oftentimes, in the evening after they have finished spreading the fertiliser, the writer and his wife sit on the fence - with a wonderful sense of "togetherness" - and listen to the magic symphony of the crickets. I can understand that. Around our house, we're pretty busy, and of course we're not the least bit integrated, but nevertheless my husband and I often sit together in the deepening twilight and listen to the sweet, gentle slosh-click, slosh-click of the dishwasher. He smiles and I smile. Oh, it's a golden moment. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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). — Jean Kerr

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 — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

I will read anything rather than work. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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

It takes at least one to make a marriage. — Jean Kerr

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

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

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

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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. — Jean Kerr

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