Quotes from Jilly Cooper

Between towering beeches, like ice cliffs, the lake glittered in the moonlight, arctic white along the frozen edges, but with a dark badger stripe of flowing water down the centre.

Lucky, lucky

She was a good if sloppy writer.

Never drink black coffee at lunch: it will keep you awake in the afternoon.

straw or a speck of dust anywhere.

I'm going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. i love you so much, I want to see two of you.

If Women's Lib want a crack at the positions of power, they must forfeit their position of weakness. It will be men and children in future who will be helped solicitously into the first lifeboats, and the man who sits like a stuck pig in the car while his wife leaps out in the pouring rain, opens the door for him, and spikes her eyes out as she covers him with an umbrella.

Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.

I adore watching other people in restaurants, beautiful people toying with steak tartare, hoping to be recognized, married couples eating but not talking, lovers eating each other, illicit couples ducking nevously behind the celery and the gristicks every time the door opens, children doing more whining than dining, storing food in the corners of their cheeks like cherubs at the corner of old maps, then suddenly spraying spinach all over the snow-white tablecloth.

It must be a terrible pressure to have to go to the office.

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

I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.

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

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

I would really like to spend more time with the family. Every time I go abroad I miss them all dreadfully.

Youve 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 theyll be there tomorrow, do you?

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

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.

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

Meetings ... are rather like cocktail parties. You don't want to go, but you're cross not to be asked.

My own parents loved each other very much.

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

For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful. Funny. yes. Clever, no.

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