Jean Kerr

Jean Kerr (July 10, 1922 – January 5, 2003) was an American author and playwright.

Sourced

• Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.
  • Mary, Mary, Act II (1961)

• The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet.
  • Time magazine (April 14, 1961)

Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957)

• You can't sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don't count).
  • "Introduction"

• If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation.
  • "Introduction"

• I will read anything rather than work.
  • "Introduction"

• Children are different—mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they're all a little bit nuts.
  • "Children Really are Not People," Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1957

• The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
  • "Children Really are Not People," Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1957

• 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.
  • "How to Get the Best of Your Children"

• 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.
  • "Aunt Jean's Marshmallow Fudge Diet"

The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

• Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself—like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.
  • "How to Talk to a Man"

• 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.
  • "The Ten Worst Things about a Man"

• I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.
  • "I was a Sand Crab"

• I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
  • "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Don't Want to Hear One Word Out of You"

Misattributed

• Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
  • In Finishing Touches (1973), Act III, Kerr borrows this line (changing "we" to "you") from Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook (1963), ch. 5