Jean Kerr Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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