Quotes from Julie Burchill

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion things to make life easier for men, in fact.

'Stress' was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification.

Make no mistake, most women are well aware that they've never had it so good when they enter a spa or salon, it is purely a hair/nails thing, a prelude to an evening of guilt-free fun.

Women, more often than not, do things which aren't remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me - that of going up to town and 'doing a show.'

When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?

What I find most upsetting about this new all-consuming beauty culture is that the obsession with good looks, and how you can supposedly attain them, is almost entirely female-driven.

Most women are wise to the fact that lots of men love a cat-fight, and thus go out of their way not to give them one.

We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.

Being a monarchist - saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another - is just as warped and strange as being a racist.

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.

The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket - they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.

A good part -- and definitely the most fun part -- of being a feminist is about frightening men.

A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

Now the whole dizzying and delirious range of sexual possibilities has been boiled down to that one big, boring, bulimic word. RELATIONSHIP.

Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a little man.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile

We sat there smiling at each other, shimmied to a standstill, thinking about all the boys that had wanted us that day, and how none of them had got us, not for a minute; how we'd let them pay for drinks and candyfloss and then run away laughing, their cries of 'Slags!' and 'Bitches' ringing in our ears like respect rather than derision.

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. (Hang on a minute and I'll get my sequins out and give you a quick rendition of 'My Way')

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.

It was the flashing lights, and the noise of the machines, and the loud, loud music, all seeming to refract and contract around her, her eyes widening, her hair swooshing, her slow smile shining. She seemed an actual part of the place - all fun, all joy, all shimmery skittering energy.

Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.