Julie Burchill Quotes

Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist.

It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not, it's a visa, and it runs out fast.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be done to, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

The latest twist on the pampering concept is spa parties, where a group of friends take over an entire spa.

In Barcelona, things seem so different. For example, I know that it's traditionally the least Spanish city, but you'd never know they had a monarchy, coming here as a tourist - as opposed to the UK, where the Queen is probably the best-known animal, vegetable and/or mineral going when it comes to overseas visitors.

The terrorist attacks were a tragedy for the people who died or were injured, and for their families and friends. For the rest of us, they were a wake-up call as to what type of lunatics we are dealing with. And sleepwalking our way back into ill-sorted, dewy-eyed people personal politics is the last thing we need to set us up for the fight ahead. Come on you liberals, don't give me the morbid pleasure of saying, 'I told you so' again.

Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable.

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.

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.

When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

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.

I jest, of course; premature ejaculation isn't a laughing matter for anyone, except for your friends when you tell them about it on the phone the next morning. My first marriage ended because the main event was invariably over before my husband got his socks off.

My favourite spectator sport is watching people who should know better searching for something, and often claiming to find it, where it never could be. Women claiming to find feminism in Islam is a good one.

Is the raggle-taggle Brangelina tribe any more bogus than that of the landlocked yummy mummy who believes that she can drop half a dozen brats and still keep a modest carbon footprint? I don't think so.

I almost choke on my popcorn when I hear film stars, who walk on red carpets as much as the rest of us do on zebra crossings, criticising youngsters who crave fame.

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.

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

Sadly, a lot of what passes for feminism these days is just moaning about men, congratulating ourselves on nothing in particular, and mocking them for being big kids while doing everything we can to keep them that way.

It may be a cliché, but it's true - the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.

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

A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery.

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

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 feel I'm trying to get this really crap car going, and it just keeps stalling on me. And then other times I feel like my life's a train thundering toward me, and I'm in a car stuck on the crossroads and can't get out. Isn't it great being young!

A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

Depression is the most extreme form of vanity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.

These women whose antics we smirk at good-naturedly in the pap-traps put themselves out there at least partly on their beauty; they are in showbiz, and showing what they've got is part of their business as much as it is for male show-ponies from the Chippendales to George Clooney.

Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

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).

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.

I feel even less patience with transsexuals.

Now the whole dizzying and delirious range of sexual possibilities has been boiled down to that one big, boring, bulimic word. RELATIONSHIP.

Surely being a Professional Beauty - let alone an ageing one - is one of the most insecure and doomed careers imaginable.

It must be said that Brighton, unlike London, makes driving seem very appealing. Instead of glowering faces and angry horns on all sides, we have the coast road in front of us and the Sussex Downs just 10 minutes behind us.

Sex, on the whole, was meant to be short, nasty and brutish. If what you want is cuddling, you should buy a puppy.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

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

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.