Jean Kerr

“Nobody ever wrote better about domestic things than Robert Benchley.”

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

“It's easier to write about what you know. I wouldn't write about a Wall Street broker, for example.”

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

“Affairs have been going on since Tolstoy.”

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

“A man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm congenitally vague.”

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

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

“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.”