Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.

An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea-girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director (however bizarre an ambition this may seem to anyone who has seen the Managing Director face on).

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

Being young is not having any money; being young is not minding not having any money.

The best career advice to give to the young is, 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.'

It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within.

Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong.

It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything. But unfortunately, although I eat like a Hoover, I read so slowly that I am always on the smart book three years after everyone else has finished.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.

The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.

Does anybody who gave up smoking to save a pound a week have a pound at the end of the week? Not on your life.

I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me.

A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it.

It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys.

Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.

As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things ...

There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get.

[On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind ...

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

As ridiculous to approve of property and let a few men have a grossly unfair share of it, as say you are all for marriage, and then let one man have all the wives.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

No nice men are good at getting taxis.

Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?

Next and hardy annuals are the ones that never come up at all.

It's a pity more men are not bastards by birth instead of vocation.

I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers.

I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.