Rachel Johnson Quotes

I'm worried about looking like a bad person when, in fact, I try to be a good person. I don't like the public image that I've been dressed with and it worries me.

If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Being boring is just wrong, isn't it? You wouldn't have got anywhere being boring.

Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.

I'd like to see women get on to boards and run companies despite the fact that men occupy the citadels of power.

Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.

It's very hard to self-motivate without someone standing over you snarling, ready to hurl the chalk at your head at the slightest slackening.

Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives. Which makes me realise that my parents were brilliant, not for what they did, but more for what they didn't do.

I think everyone can recognize the one-upmanship and the competition that go on wherever you are, especially among groups where the women don't have to hold down office jobs and instead get in a total snit about who won the longest carrot contest or took first prize for summer chutney in the August fete.

I am a total coffee snob and bore. If anyone makes the mistake of offering me 'a coffee' they tend to regret it - I'm worse than Mariah Carey, and the hot milk rider is completely non-negotiable.

I want 'The Lady' magazine to be restored to its traditional place in the pantheon of weekly magazines.

'The Lady' is a piddling little magazine that no one cares about or buys.

People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talking about.

I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of 'Private Eye' and a latte.

I don't mind being called snobbish, a pain and a social climber, but being called unkind really hurts.

With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, 'natural history.'

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.

Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.

It's often discouraging sitting working at home, wondering whether to put the heating on, answering the doorbell to the gas board, feeling it's all utterly pointless.

There was a time when no difficult subjects were ever aired in the 'Lady', and sadly, life isn't like that.

In Germany, salads are assemblies of ham and mayonnaise, not trendy tossed leaves.

If you tell the truth you get into trouble, and that's why politicians are extremely dull.

I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.