Quotes from Jean Hanff Korelitz

People don't realize you can't copyright a plot," Alessandro said finally. "You can't even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.

Cause I'm telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.

Rochelle went silent again. It was interesting, I thought. I resolved to be more like this, myself: not to speak until I was ready. Obviously, people waited for you.

Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and meanspiritedness--that was special.

She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.

He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace

It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.

After the accident he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air…He wasn't in despair, he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly tumbling at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity…He was there, but he was always in that other place, the tumbling place, the place he was used to now.

Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Well, there is narcissism in all of us, of course. I mean, we are the protagonists of our own lives, so naturally it feels like we're at the wheel. But we're not at the wheel. That just happens to be where the window is located.

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. Fifteen down. One—please

I know it's supposed to take a village to raise our children, but why does ours have so many village idiots?

Most of all, I am struck by an irony central to the lot of a purebred dog: As it attains the hallmarks of its breed, it seems to simultaneously relinquish its basic dogginess, until it is less a dog than a Pomeranian, Collie or Bloodhound.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

My first three novels were all the subjects of intensely exciting flurries of calls from producers and even stars' production companies, and once someone actually hired a screenwriter to adapt one of my books - but it all came to nothing, so I tried not to get too excited when a Hollywood suitor came calling for 'Admission,' my fourth novel.

You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean.

My dog is vicious to the uninvited guest, lavishly affectionate to the invited one, and so freakishly acute that he has mastered the English language.