Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.

Does anybody who gave up smoking to save a pound a week have a pound at the end of the week? Not on your life.

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers.

I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.

Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything. But unfortunately, although I eat like a Hoover, I read so slowly that I am always on the smart book three years after everyone else has finished.

It's a pity more men are not bastards by birth instead of vocation.

a perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.

A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the office as a social center, but it's no place actually to get any work done.

The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

As ridiculous to approve of property and let a few men have a grossly unfair share of it, as say you are all for marriage, and then let one man have all the wives.

In hell they will bore you, in heaven you will bore them.

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.

The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

The Life and Soul, the man who will never go home while there is one man, woman or glass of anything not yet drunk.

Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

Perennials are the ones that grow like weeds, biennials are the ones that die this year instead of next and hardy annuals are the ones that never come up at all.

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.

An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea-girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director (however bizarre an ambition this may seem to anyone who has seen the Managing Director face on).

As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things.

Children and zip fasteners do not respond to force ... except occasionally.

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

American patriotism is generally something that amuses Europeans, I suppose because children look idiotic saluting the flag and because the constitution contains so many cracks through which the lawyers may creep.

Whereas a lot of men used to ask for conversation when they really wanted sex, nowadays they often feel obliged to ask for sex even when they really want conversation.

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.

The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts.

Spring makes everything look filthy.

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one.

People get a bad impression of it [the English climate] by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.

A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.

Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?

Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong.

As I look around the West End these days, it seems to me that outside every thin girl is a fat man, trying to get in.