The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature.
The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.
Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.
Did you know that Puritanism went hand in hand with dirt, that Oliver Cromwell put a 100 per cent tax on soap and that the repeal of the soap tax was one of the most popular acts of Charles II at his Restoration?
It is a waste of time to dissipate one’s moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.
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.
Whoever declares a child to be “delicate” thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.