Quotes About Privacy

Some of the things I've seen a lot of my female-actress friends who are relatively famous receive - I've seen some hideous things. Like some really, really bad things... like, the FBI should be contacted immediately.

As for poor dear Miss Mitford's book, I was entirely upset by the biography she thought it necessary or expedient to give of me. Oh, if our friends would but put off anatomising one till after one was safely dead, and call to mind that, previously, we have nerves to be agonised and morbid brains to be driven mad!

Just as well, as it saved me having to invoke privacy, or bite. Metaphorically speaking. Biting a colleague is probably grounds for dismissal, even—especially?—in a massively multispecies, massively multicultural work environment.

Patty felt another blush stain her cheeks as she drew her knees up and, hurrying her feet under her bulk, hid herself in differential equations again.

She swallowed uncomfortable dryness at the unprecedented endearment, trying not to remember he'd been as affectionate to Mr. Priest when she was not meant to overhear.

People had secrets. You lived with it or you didn't.

If it was any of my business, somebody would tell me about it eventually.

The full story was not for strangers in bars.

It must be awkward wearing one's whole interior life on display, for anyone to read.

I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach and I keep my feelings to myself.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

What I have always found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

a place she could go to and be alone,

I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me.

Ask them about their sex lives or their drinking habits or the times they beat up on Granny and they may dodge around a little but eventually they'll tell you all about it - they're dying to tell. Get to the money question, though, and they start acting like you just tore off all their clothes in public. In some way, money is the cover we use for the most intimate parts of ourselves.

I certainly don't want a child of mine to be famous, or anyone I was very close to who isn't yet... It's the worst thing to be trapped in your house not be able to leave.

There are some things you shouldn't have to discuss with your parents, lesbian conception is one of them.

What I like about limousines is they have tinted windows, so no-one can see if you're snogging in the back seat.

I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.

She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.

All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes.

My mother would hate me saying any of this. My father, too. It didn't matter how unprivate you were: If what you had to say about your life impinged on the privacy of others, then you shouldn't say it. My mother loved stories, though, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like.

My parents disapproved of very little that I did. They didn't approve, either: Whatever opinions they had about what I did, they kept to themselves. They believed my life was my own business. This, I understand now, is a great gift, though a gift that comes without kvelling.

Just once, I wanted to lose something without the whole world watching.