73 Quotes by Jilly Cooper

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people’s minds in England.

I’m not wild about holidays. They always seem a ludicrously expensive way of proving there’s no place like home.

The only thing a whirlwind courtship does is blow dust in everyone’s eyes.

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

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.

Go to lots of interviews, at least one a month even when you don’t need a job, to keep in training for when you do.

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 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.