Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male – or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be. Just watch a beer commercial and you’ll see what I mean.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

If he invited you out, he’s got to pay.

People like me were supposed to be into exclusivity, unapproachable. That’s what I hate most. I think it’s very demode.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

It’s very strange to go to cities like London and New York. People walk so quickly, they seem to be in a hurry all the time. And you don’t say ‚Hi‘ to everyone you meet, and you don’t smile to everyone you meet, because there’s just so many. Which is also very strange.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer – or maybe president.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I’ll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

In the ’50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

When everybody looks at our generation of kids, they always call us the misfits – you know, like we just don’t give a damn.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

When people say ‚marriage‘ to me… It’s always a means to an end. Everyone’s so in a rush to define the relationship.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

I didn’t think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I’m not put together like the other chaps.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

The English don’t like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It’s alright if they come from an ‚intellectual,‘, but from a pop star you’re getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn’t rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you’re in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn’t it?

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: ‚If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin.‘ But if it’s open and you’re walkin‘ by, feel free to say, ‚Hello.‘

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

I don’t eat with beautiful women alone.

At the end of the day, women are a distraction. Whether you realize it or not.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

No one wants to see curvy women.

A man has a tendency to accept you the way you are, while most women immediately start to pick flaws and want to change you.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‚call attention to yourself,‘ or ‚think you were smart.‘ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

I’m a woman, and anytime you tell a woman that she looks nice, it’s not going to upset her.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.