Top 200 Caitlin Moran Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “It’s always sunny above the clouds. Always. Every day on earth – every day I have ever had – was secretly sunny, after all.”

— Caitlin Moran

2. “The world is difficult and we are all breakable. So just be kind.”

— Caitlin Moran

3. “Self-harm – the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.”

— Caitlin Moran

4. “A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival.”

— Caitlin Moran

5. “Always remember that, nine times out of ten, you probably aren’t having a full-on nervous breakdown – you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’d be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.”

— Caitlin Moran

6. “If you’re not a confident person, pretend to be one.”

— Caitlin Moran

7. “Freely available, hardcore 21st-century pornography blasts through men’s and women’s sexual imaginations like antibiotics and kills all mystery, uncertainty, and doubt – good and bad.”

— Caitlin Moran

8. “Why on earth have I, because I’m a woman, got to be nice to everyone?”

— Caitlin Moran

9. “If you read all your history books, there are no women in them.”

— Caitlin Moran

10. “Nowadays, to be frank, every week is a good week for freakshow television. we might start asking, Why are there so many freaks? And why do they all want to be on television?”

— Caitlin Moran

11. “Being able to wear underwear brilliantly is such a key talent for a woman that there are even competitions to judge who is the best at it: Miss America, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Universe. You can call this “the swimsuit round” all you like – we know what it really means. It’s the “bra and undies round.”

— Caitlin Moran

12. “As Germaine Greer puts it in The Whole Woman, “to become a mother without wanting it is to live like a slave, or domestic animal.”

— Caitlin Moran

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

— Caitlin Moran

14. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

15. “I am pathetically law-abiding.”

— Caitlin Moran

16. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

17. “All art is someone trying to tell you something.”

— Caitlin Moran

18. “I loved Riot Grrl. Not only was it a punk rock revolution, but it meant you could get dressed for a night out for less than two pounds!”

— Caitlin Moran

19. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

20. “Evenings never end – they just, without you noticing, turn into tomorrow.”

— Caitlin Moran

21. “In 2010, Iceland – with a lesbian prime minister and a parliament that is 50 percent female – became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. “I.”

— Caitlin Moran

22. “When people ask workingwomen, “When are you going to have a baby?” what they’re really asking is “When are you going to leave?”

— Caitlin Moran

23. “It demeans a society to rely on random acts of mercy, Johanna.”

— Caitlin Moran

24. “It’s really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.”

— Caitlin Moran

25. “You don’t live in London. You play London – to win. That’s why we’re all here. It is a city full of contestants, each chasing one of a million possible prizes: wealth, love, fame. Inspiration.”

— Caitlin Moran

26. “In the 21st century, we don’t need to march against size-zero models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs, and Botox. We don’t need to riot or go on hunger strikes. There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it.”

— Caitlin Moran

27. “My core belief is that if you’re complaining about something for more than three minutes, two minutes ago you should have done something about it.”

— Caitlin Moran

28. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

29. “If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.”

— Caitlin Moran

30. “You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don’t think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.”

— Caitlin Moran

31. “I think if you thought about it a little while longer, you’d realize that you’d far better be a Ghostbuster: a nerd in New York with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back, and a one-in-four chance of being Bill Murray.”

— Caitlin Moran

32. “But that is all part of becoming an adult. That is the difference between girls and women. That they are finally ready to hear the secret of what makes them them. That they are strong enough – for good, or for ill – to ask someone what is, unexpectedly, the most terrifying, revelatory question, on Earth; one you have to be brave, and ready, to hear: “Why do you love me?”

— Caitlin Moran

33. “I’m so glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely.”

— Caitlin Moran

34. “But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.”

— Caitlin Moran

35. “Feminism has had exactly the same problem that “political correctness” has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.”

— Caitlin Moran

36. “I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse.”

— Caitlin Moran

37. “Rock ’n’ roll is a terrible babysitter, baby.”

— Caitlin Moran

38. “This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books – sometimes you don’t know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or “autodidiact,” as I said, on the same shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong.”

— Caitlin Moran

39. “Benedict Cumberbatch is very beautiful.”

— Caitlin Moran

40. “There’s no point in drinking if no one’s watching.”

— Caitlin Moran

41. “You think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise.”

— Caitlin Moran

42. “Babies being “given” to women as gifts makes the women sound powerless.”

— Caitlin Moran

43. “Explaining why you love something is one of the most important jobs on earth.”

— Caitlin Moran

44. “If you do it properly, life is art, really.”

— Caitlin Moran

45. “The reason they don’t ask me when they’re having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they’ve had a baby.”

— Caitlin Moran

46. “I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse. It’s really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.”

— Caitlin Moran

47. “In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.”

— Caitlin Moran

48. “You can’t meet your heroes – because they are, in the end, just an idea, that lives inside you.”

— Caitlin Moran

49. “We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people, rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people.”

— Caitlin Moran

50. “I hate stories where the conclusion is that women just have to suffer and get stronger,” Julia said. “Those are the worst stories.”

— Caitlin Moran