Quotes from Julie Burchill

Being a child is horrible. It is slightly better than being a tree or a piece of heavy machinery but not half as good as being a domestic cat.

And call me a pig, but isn't it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they're still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they're hanging the Closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

People often yearn back to more innocent times, but more and more, as I get older, I find myself hankering after more jaded days.

Youth, health, wealth and beauty are meant to be fuel, to be burned in pursuit of pleasure, and not fruit to be pickled in anticipation of some future famine.

I find it hard to follow a party line. I'm too much of a populist -- which is why I'm against hunting but pro hanging. I find it quite hard to find like-minded souls.

There isn't a word for homosexual I do like! Having said that, I would never describe myself as "heterosexual", "straight" or anything else. Especially not "bisexual" (it sounds like a sort of communal vehicle missing a mudguard). I like "spontaneous" as a sexual description.

It has been said ... that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not -- it's a visa, and it runs out fast.

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.

Prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

OK, so she ran off with a boy young enough to be her waist measurement. But at least she had the decency to do the dirty quietly and not hang around long enough to conduct a masterclass on familial trauma courtesy of the local rag, without even bothering to change the names.

I friggin' hate that word! 'Vulnerable' -- it's what wimpy men have to believe all women are inside no matter how tough they seem, or else they'll wet their Y-fronts in fear!

I don't fall out with people easily but several female friends I have had to cut loose because they would press their unwanted sexual attentions on me when they were drunk, and, as I've said, I fancy women very rarely and when I do, they're in their 20s. It's so sucky being a feminist Hugh Hefner.

I look at single people and they don't seem particularly happy as a species. My advice is marry often and live apart. Best of both worlds.

Trying to cling to what you had when you were young would be so tragic, horrible, and after a certain age ambition is horribly disfiguring to the character.

I might ask the Lord to please help me not to be a certain way, but not to forgive me. Pointless.

If people displease me too much, I just leave 'em to it. There's no point in trying to change people -- and there are a million people out there one could be equally good friends with. Generally I forgive very easily, and then one day I just switch off. It's best that way, or else you spend your life fretting.

I express my faith by being extremely generous to others, particularly those in need -- not censorious of myself, which I see as a kind of useless, tight-fisted vanity.

It's so lovely that even in prison, men who aren't touchy-feely have to be stopped from beating up rapists -- not just child molesters, but rapists of grown women. It's a shame that educated middle-class leftwing men can't take feminism on board so effectively.

Brighton is like Bristol-on-sea. It's for people who are happy with where they've got to in life and don't want to go any further.

Some people should be paid not to write another novel.

I don't really care what people tell children - when you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, one more fib won't hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion, posited in some touchy-feely quarters, that all women are, or can be, beautiful.

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women ' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man ' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?