Quotes from Jean Hanff Korelitz

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.

A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.

I started thinking about what I've always been interested in: how people can't see things that are right in front of them. All you have to do is read the papers to see endless examples of smart people who can't see the nose on their faces.

A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference.

Naturally, no march on Washington would be complete without its counter-demonstration.

I was 11 years old and horse-obsessed. New York City was an unfortunate place for a girl like me to be growing up.

When you get right down to it, there's something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next.

I made it to London aged six, an event I recorded in my diary with coloured markers to convey my sense of occasion. And in 1983, after graduating from college, I returned to spend two years at Cambridge University.

To me, respect for human life begins with making it more difficult to obtain an inanimate object that is designed to snuff it out.

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)

There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.

Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready to make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes.

All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead . If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died? And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.

If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn't be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty.

And one day she said to me, 'For the rest of my life, it's the first thing they'll say about me when I leave the room.' And I remember thinking: Yes that's true, it will be. But we can't really do anything about what they say when we leave the room. We'll never be able to control that. And we shouldn't try. Our job is just to...well, be in the room while we're there, and try not to think too much about where we're not. Whatever room we happen to be in, just, be there.

Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs...in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly.

You're only as successful as the last book you published, and you're only as good as the next book you're writing. So shut up and write.

I've always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold. It's how stories survive through the ages. You can follow an idea from one author's work to another, and to me that's something I find powerful and exciting.

Pick the wrong person and it doesn't matter how much you want to fix your marriage. It won't work.

I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we're so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don't come with a thunderbolt attached.

if you're paying attention, if your eyes and your ears and your mind are open, as they should be open. You can know and then, critically, hold on to that knowledge, even if he loves you (or seems to), even if he chooses you (or seems to), even if he promises to make you happy (which no one, not one person on the planet, can possibly do). And part of her, a big part of her, had obviously wanted to be the one who told them this. Because I am such a competent

You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness.

The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms.