Jilly Cooper Quotes

I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.

I love the long grass coming up to meet the willows.

I'm bored stiff by ballet. i can't bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin.

I'm basically a very happy person and I don't have to be anybody else.

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.

The bank told us we ought to sell this house to pay off our overdraft. Riders saved the day. I was so pleased when it got to number one, I went all around the fields crying and crying.

People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried ...

Our house is so difficult to find that people always arrive late, which means that by the time we go into dinner, I've had so many dry Martinis I'm practically under the piano, and it no longer seems to matter that I haven't put the potatoes on.

Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men.

If you feel compelled to give a New Year's Eve party, don't invite people to arrive too early or they'll go off the boil before midnight.

Always be nice to everyone in the firm on the way up. You never know who you may meet on the way down.

Go to lots of interviews, at least one a month even when you don't need a job, to keep in training for when you do.

He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.

But really I'm not terribly interested in what I eat.

the looniness of the long distance runner - pounding along country lanes, so anxious to lop off seconds he never stops to marvel at a field of buttercups or a flock of geese against the sky.

The aristocrat, when he wants to, has very good manners. The Scottish upper classes, in particular, have that shell-shocked look that probably comes from banging their heads on low beams leaping to their feet whenever a woman comes into the room. Aristocrats are also deeply male chauvinist, and ... on the whole they tend to be reactionary.

The only thing a whirlwind courtship does is blow dust in everyone's eyes.

You've simply got to go on and on with your family and friends and tell them how much you love them because you never know whether they'll be there tomorrow, do you?

The memo's chief function ... is as a track-coverer, so that you can turn on someone six months later and snarl: 'Well, you should have known about it, I sent you a memo.

If you look across the valley, you can see exactly what I mean: about four beautiful houses, and you think something is happening in each of them. It's like a mural.

And I would really like to be a grandmother, but only when Felix or Emily meet the right person and are ready.

I'm not wild about holidays. They always seem a ludicrously expensive way of proving there's no place like home.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.

There is something infinitely dingy about the word workshop. Pray that England doesn't become a nation of workshopkeepers.

At home I have big vats of cabbage soup that I make to slim down.

I loathe the telephone - vile, shrill-voiced intruder. i'd never answer it at all if I didn't feel I might be missing something: a million-pound offer from a film company or Robert Mitchum asking me out to lunch. I hate the element of uncertainty - you never know if it's going to be a friend or a foe on the line. I wish they'd invent a telephone which turned green like a breath-test when it was an enemy ringing, so I needn't answer it.

I'd never have written the big books in London.

I think we ought to have a kindness year, or a kindness century.

In our vile English climate, rough winds shake not only the darling buds of May, but of June, July, August and September as well.

My own parents loved each other very much.

I live at home and, if I want to start work at 11 o'clock, I can.

I've got a book coming out soon so I just must get some weight off.

It's a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extricating himself.

But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.

Leo, sadly, has Parkinson's, but he used to cook all sorts of dazzling things.

Hurting other people is not excusable because you've been hurt yourself.