Caitlin Moran Quotes

Feminism, as it stands, well... stands. It has ground to a halt.

I am fully aware of what the word 'fat' means ... It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.

I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

...there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.

I wish I could give up smoking, but it does taste so delicious.

When you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.

I'm SO glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely.

We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.

When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the 'Broken Windows' theory led him to implement the 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years. Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Windows issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on 'All The Patriarchal Bullshit'.

But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.

I had given up on being beautiful. But I thought I could kind of inspire boys to write songs about me. So I became a music journalist at the age of 16.

I like a little bit of revolution. I think it's a very good hobby for a young woman. Better than squash.

The word spinster tells you everything that you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry, yes.

I do not... look very feminine. Diana, Princess of Wales is feminine... I am... femi-none.

Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.

Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself.

If you come from a working-class background, you can't afford to write full time, because you're just not being paid. Basically, all my arguments come down to Marxist doctrine: The world is shaped by money, so the only voices you'll hear are the ones with money behind them. But thankfully, culture and cool are some things that circumvent money, because if you're cool, people will want to give you money - suddenly you shape the market and people start coming to you. Which is why culture has always been a traditional way out for working-class people.

I think loads of women have this idea that their life is going to start at some point, once they've busted all these problems of being a woman, once we're thin and we're pretty and we've got all of our clothes and stuff, that's when our life will begin. And you meet people at 48 who are still thinking that, and 58.

I wish I could learn that just three drinks is enough, but I have not learned that.

We need to reclaim the word feminism. We need to reclaim the word feminism real bad.

Culture is so much faster and so much more effective than anything else. If you go on a march, you march for a couple hours and it might be on the news that night, but if it happens culturally, it happens forever. Everywhere in the world, that TV show is being played. Someone is downloading it illegally. It's blowing someone else's mind. Culture marches so quickly, and it's a language we all understand.

So this is why I can't agree with "don't feed the trolls." When millionaire celebrity broadcasters and entire publications start trolling, ignoring them isn't really an option anymore. They are gradually making trolling normative. We have to start feeding the trolls: feeding them with achingly polite emails and comments, reminding them of how billions of people prefer to communicate with each other, every day, in the most unregulated arena of all: courteously.

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves - rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.

I am pathetically law-abiding.

But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can’t agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress.

Whenever I see a taboo, I just think that's something we need to drag screaming out into the light and discuss. Because taboos are where our fears live, and taboos are the things that keep us tiny. Particularly for women.

There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.

I told my girls, 'Look at Rihanna: She's one of the biggest pop stars in the world. She's really famous, really powerful, really rich. Yet in every single video she can only wear panties. Poor Rhianna! We'll know when she is properly powerful and successful when we see her in a lovely cardigan.'

I come from grunge, and then Brit-pop, scenes where you boast about how little you spent on an outfit. ... Now, it seems you must find The Dress, then The Dress needs to have The Belt, and a complementary but not overly-matching bag must be found which works with not only the correct hosiery, but with something to throw over yourself if you become chilly.

As far as I'm concerned, you're a feminist by default if you're born in the Western world right now.

Just proportionately, statistically, one in three women are going to have an abortion. They're not all going to feel guilty.

It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating or singing. It's like being mugged by Cupid.

I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?

There's something so free about being a fan and being enthusiastic about stuff - you attract all the other people who are also loving and enthusiastic when you're sending out signals of love. When you start to communicate cynicism and hatred, it leads you down a completely different path.

When you say you're not a feminist, if feminism hadn't existed, and you didn't live in a feminist world, you wouldn't be saying that, because you'd be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband's tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34.

If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.

You just wanted to be normal. It wasn't even being beautiful. I just wanted to be smooth and thin and have, and you know, have beautiful glossy hair and lovely clothes and be able to walk in heels. And I thought that once I did all of that stuff that my life would begin.

I’m going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I’m currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going to run for parliament, it would be solely on a platform of ‘Get Women In Massive Grundie’s’.

All the things that are taboo are the things that are not normal, and all the things that are not normal are the things that are exclusively about physically being a woman.

A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.