Quotes from Jilly Cooper

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

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

There is nothing more attractive than a man who is not a New Man.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The thing that first knocked me out about Amsterdam, even on the coldest, greyest February day, was its beauty. The houses rise, red and grey, and seem to float swanlike above the canals. The sheen on the water is olive-green, and mallards with their brilliant emerald heads slide gravely under the bridges. if you close your eyes you can see the city peopled again by those who built it - seventeenth century burghers in their black coats, rich from trading with the Indies.

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.

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.

To bring the balloon of the mind that bellies and drags in the wind, as Yeats had so perfectly put it, into its narrow shed.

A man from the Electricity Board has been rabbiting on like Mr Darcy about the inferiority of our connections and says the whole place will have to be rewired.

I simply adore Princeton. To begin with it is so beautiful : ravishing white clapboard houses with dark green shutters, verandas weighed down with great amethyst watrfalls of wisaria, mists of white dogwood and syringa; copper beeches so shiny that they must be put outside the gardens to be polished every night.

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

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.

We all need the pipe dream of writing the great novel, or winning the pools, or becoming managing director and kicking all our colleagues in the teeth. The world is deep and dark and full of tigers, and we need those shimmering white castles in the air to creep into when life gets unbearable.

What was the point of becoming famous anyway? The Press dumped on you when you were alive, and pigeons when you were dead.

Out in the country, autumn was busy daubing the woods in orange and yellow. Rooks and gulls argued over newly ploughed fields. Behind veils of little cobwebs, the hedgerows blushed with berries.