Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

That road, as it turned out, would be even lonelier than she had reason to fear.

want of a better idea, she washed her face with the available hand soap and dried

When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place.

A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.

Everything about the guy screamed FICTION WRITER, though the species itself broke down more or less evenly into the subcategories: 1. Great American Novelist 2. -New York Times- Bestselling Author Or that highly rare hybrid... 3. -New York Times- Bestselling Great American Novelist

was a skill she had always inwardly marveled at when she discovered it in one of her patients, the smooth transitions and fancy footwork with which someone took a nugget of non-negotiable fact, modified it on the spot, and handed it back, an altogether new and tangible animal

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 says they can't be held liable for defamation made by third parties. They're considered a vector for other people's free speech, technically, so they're in the clear.

But Portia's application would have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn't going to be Princeton.

people with different ideas from one's own were not the enemy; they were simply people with different ideas. Hearing them out carried, he supposed, some small potential for having one's mind changed, but it was far more likely to strengthen the opinion you already had, so why all the fear?

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.

certainly the only family member she ever saw). She could recall doing the things she supposed most other children did—playing in dirt, looking at pictures—without any accompanying grief or anger

She had learned not to expect love, and wasn't even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she'd managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother's presence.

And the truth is, the world is full of therapists who'll sit you down, take your money, massage your self-esteem, and send you on your way, without ever helping you understand how you helped create the circumstances that brought you here.

I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. —C. K. Chesterton, via Evelyn Waugh

But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.

He lacked any musicality, for example; that was a disappointment. He lacked a kind of easy friendliness he could see in other people. Finally, and especially after the accident, he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air. On it swirled around him as he struggled to right himself, and sometimes fought a powerful urge for it to simply stop. That was the biggest deficit of all. That impacted everything.

She wanted to go on food tours of the Lower East Side, guided history walks in Tribeca, gospel brunches in Harlem, all of those things native (or at least "established") New Yorkers tended to turn up their noses at, preferring to maintain a smug ignorance about their city.

Or we of the tribe who delude ourselves into thinking the Orioles will one day win the World Series!