Jean Hanff Korelitz > Quotes

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“They were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives...the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.”
― Jean Korelitz, Admission

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“Cause I’m telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“I know it’s supposed to take a village to raise our children, but why does ours have so many village idiots?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“Teammates...were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C'mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home—the sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz

“You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“She persuades herself that something she has intuitively seen in a man she barely knows isn’t true at all now that she—quote unquote—has gotten to know him better. And it’s that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful. And it can have the most devastating impact on a woman’s life. And we’ll always let ourselves off the hook for it, in our own lives, even as we’re looking at some other deluded woman and thinking: How could she not have known? And I feel, just so strongly, that we need to hold ourselves to that same standard. And before we’re taken in, not after.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Either it’s a good plot or it isn’t. And if it’s not a good plot, the best writing isn’t going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn’t going to hurt it.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“...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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and meanspiritedness--that was special.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“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.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, You Should Have Known

“After that phone call, though, it was a moot issue, and some instinct had sent him in the opposite direction: from the Nazi Mercedes-Benz company to that perfectly all-American anti-Semite Henry Ford.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Brooklyn Heights, where a frankly socialist ethos stood in bald contrast to soaring tuition”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer