In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
The love that dare not speak its name has become the love that won’t shut up.
In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift, not from Shopsy’s.
Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?
Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don’t know who I am and don’t care. I sign “Jackie Collins” and they go away quite content.
It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.
It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency, and probably were.
After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.
People are not saints just because they haven’t got much money or education.
A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed.
The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences – a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
Whether you are really right or not doesn’t matter; it’s the belief that counts.
Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together.
Whoever declares a child to be “delicate” thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.
I think we’re living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn’t need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.
Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It’s usually fun at someone’s expense. Nowadays if you’re funny at anybody’s expense they run to the UN and say, “I must have an ombudsman to protect me.” You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.
Happiness is a by-product. It is not a primary product of life. It is a thing which you suddenly realize you have because you’re so delighted to be doing something which perhaps has nothing whatever to do with happiness.
The ideal companion in bed is a good book.