Famous Quotes By Julie Burchill

 

1. A good part - and definitely the most fun part - of being a feminist is about frightening men.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. As I get older I think, contrary to modern assumption but in line with the old Lerner and Lowe song, that it would actually benefit both them and society if - to quote Professor Higgins - a woman could be more like a man.
5. 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.
6. Being a monarchist - saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another - is just as warped and strange as being a racist.
7. 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).
8. 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.
9. From paying off friends' tax bills to rescuing stray dogs and stuffing £20 notes into the hands of homeless people, I can't get rid of my money fast enough.
10. 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.
11. It may be a cliche, but it's true - the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.
12. It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.
13. It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.
14. I've always thought of beauty therapy, 'alternative' treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched.
15. I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?
16. Lots of women love to accuse men of being immature when the fellow in question displays a reluctance to 'commit.'
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. My dad didn't drive - the only dad I knew who didn't.
21. 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.
22. No matter how old and glorious the models, sad indeed is the woman who sees fashion as a means of self-expression rather than an agent of social control.
23. No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.
24. One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me - that of going up to town and 'doing a show.'
25. Shame, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.
26. Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a little man.
27. 'Stress' was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification.
28. Surely being a Professional Beauty - let alone an ageing one - is one of the most insecure and doomed careers imaginable.
29. 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.
30. 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.
31. The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion things to make life easier for men, in fact.
32. The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket - they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.
33. We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.
34. 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.
35. What sort of sap doesn't know by now that picture-perfect beauty is all done with smoke and mirrors anyway?
36. When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?
37. When I moved out of London 13 years ago, I found a whole other reason not to drive. This was because my new husband Dan, unlike my dad, did drive, and this became a great source of fun and adventure.
38. Women, more often than not, do things which aren't remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.