Top 77 Julie Burchill Quotes

The allegedly ‘classy’ magazines often seem to be in an endless, undeclared competition to see who can climb furthest up the fundament of Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Lopez.

Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I’ll show you a little man.

Shame, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth… suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

What sort of sap doesn’t know by now that picture-perfect beauty is all done with smoke and mirrors anyway?

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common.

As a kid, I grew to define what I didn’t want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined.

As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.

Women, more often than not, do things which aren’t remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.

As a child, I wanted only two things – to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.

Monarchists frequently declare that without the royal family, Britain would be ‘nothing.’ What a woeful lack of love for one’s country such statements express.

Blakes Hotel in South Kensington was a particular favourite of mine during what I affectionately think of as my Restless Years.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

Having ‘best friends’ is – at least for me – as outdated and small-minded a concept as the idea of ‘Sunday best clothes.’

There’s something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times – one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of.

When actresses jump on the anti-Iraq bandwagon, they often combine down-home momism with an ignorance of Islamist intent which is truly awesome.

Here in Barcelona, it’s the architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic who are the objects of admiration – not a bunch of half-witted monarchs.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

Being a monarchist, and fawning over those ‘above’ you, you must naturally despise those ‘below’ or on the same socioeconomic level as yourself, because that is how hierarchy worship works.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that those who choose acting as a profession are phonies who live in a fantasy world. What is surprising is how many of them are blissfully unaware of it.

As I have got older, I have found myself making friends with the ease and swiftness that other people pick up fuzzballs on their jumpers. And I believe it is probably my lack of longing for ‘The One’ that makes me so popular.

What men don’t want, in fact what anyone who’s any sort of thrill-seeking, intelligent adult doesn’t want, is some crushing bore describing their emotions in real time every waking hour.

Make no mistake, most women are well aware that they’ve never had it so good; when they enter a spa or salon, it is purely a hair/nails thing, a prelude to an evening of guilt-free fun.

I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances.

I am not one of those fat birds who feels miserable because models are thin. Frankly, I feel more insulted by the idea that unless I see other fat birds in fashion magazines, I will be reduced to a sniveling wreck of a human being.

To believe that one, or even three, mates can supply all the things one needs from one’s friends is as stupid as believing married couples must do everything together.

The Feminist Me says that a woman’s right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.

I just have a real problem with people who seek to portray fatness or thinness as moral concepts.

I know that Brighton is famously a mixture of the seedy and the elegant, but in the summer of 2001 seediness swamped elegance hands down.

Big women do themselves a disservice when they attempt to become the Righteous Fat (the Righteous Thin are bad enough, all that running around and sweating, somehow believing it means anything).

Nicole Kidman in particular seems to bring out the butt-kisser in the sassiest of hackettes, as they ceaselessly strive to portray her as some sort of cross between Mother Teresa and Marilyn Monroe.

The secret is not to care what anyone thinks of you.

I don’t really care what people tell children – when you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, one more fib won’t hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion, posited in some touchy-feely quarters, that all women are, or can be, beautiful.

One of the few ways in which I feel I’ve actually matured is that as I’ve grown older I do find the concept of ‘men’ mystifying, whereas when I was a feisty young thing I was forever saying ‘The most fun part of being a feminist is frightening men!’

When a man wants to relax, he will slob out and really relax. Or he will pursue a hobby – anything from building models to watching sport.

Because I was an only, I had more things, and I remember early on the kick I got from giving stuff away. Despite all the myths about only children not being able to share, actually I’ve never knowingly met a stingy one.

Most women are wise to the fact that lots of men love a cat-fight, and thus go out of their way not to give them one.

The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it; most of us have it not at all. And that’s perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don’t seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.

Knowing that the ‘Sex and the City’ chicks now rack up almost two centuries between them, why do some of us fuss and hiss about a bit of retouching on their forthcoming film poster?

What I find most upsetting about this new all-consuming beauty culture is that the obsession with good looks, and how you can supposedly attain them, is almost entirely female-driven.

In my third husband I had discovered a blissfully laid-back type who thought it nothing less than hilarious when I misread the map on the way to Wales, so it took us an extra three hours, or when I was sick in a plastic carrier bag during much of the drive back from Devon – a bag that turned out to have a hole in it.

People – and I include myself – get fat because they choose pleasure over self-denial.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Fact is, famous people say fame stinks because they love it so – like a secret restaurant or holiday island they don’t want the hoi polloi to get their grubby paws on.

It’s received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

My second husband believed I had such a fickle attitude to friendship that each Friday he would update the list of my ‘Top Ten’ friends in the manner of a Top Of The Pops chart countdown.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

It’s very hard to imagine the phrase ‘consumer society’ used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

A therapist might suggest my generosity is a way of buying affection. But buying people’s love has never been an issue for me. Generally speaking, I don’t want their love.

A good part – and definitely the most fun part – of being a feminist is about frightening men.

And call me a pig, but isn’t it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they’re still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they’re hanging the Closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam.