Top 40 Jilly Cooper Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people’s minds in England.”

— Jilly Cooper

2. “Always be nice to everyone in the firm on the way up. You never know who you may meet on the way down.”

— Jilly Cooper

3. “Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake all afternoon.”

— Jilly Cooper

4. “The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.”

— Jilly Cooper

5. “I live at home and, if I want to start work at 11 o’clock, I can.”

— Jilly Cooper

6. “At home I have big vats of cabbage soup that I make to slim down.”

— Jilly Cooper

7. “There is nothing more attractive than a man who is not a New Man.”

— Jilly Cooper

8. “I think it bespeaks a generous nature, a man who can cook.”

— Jilly Cooper

9. “For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful. Funny. yes. Clever, no.”

— Jilly Cooper

10. “Youve simply got to go on and on with your family and friends and tell them how much you love them because you never know whether theyll be there tomorrow, do you?”

— Jilly Cooper

11. “Although it is the biggest time-waster in office life, you must never underrate the importance of the memo. You will be judged by the volume of your paper work.”

— Jilly Cooper

12. “I’m not wild about holidays. They always seem a ludicrously expensive way of proving there’s no place like home.”

— Jilly Cooper

13. “People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried...”

— Jilly Cooper

14. “There is something infinitely dingy about the word workshop. Pray that England doesn’t become a nation of workshopkeepers.”

— Jilly Cooper

15. “But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I’ve got to pay a tax bill, so I’d better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.”

— Jilly Cooper

16. “Leo, sadly, has Parkinsons, but he used to cook all sorts of dazzling things.”

— Jilly Cooper

17. “If you feel compelled to give a New Year’s Eve party, don’t invite people to arrive too early or they’ll go off the boil before midnight.”

— Jilly Cooper

18. “I would really like to spend more time with the family. Every time I go abroad I miss them all dreadfully.”

— Jilly Cooper

19. “The thing that first knocked me out about Amsterdam, even on the coldest, greyest February day, was its beauty. The houses rise, red and grey, and seem to float swanlike above the canals. The sheen on the water is olive-green, and mallards with their brilliant emerald heads slide gravely under the bridges. if you close your eyes you can see the city peopled again by those who built it – seventeenth century burghers in their black coats, rich from trading with the Indies.”

— Jilly Cooper

20. “I love the long grass coming up to meet the willows.”

— Jilly Cooper

21. “I think we ought to have a kindness year, or a kindness century.”

— Jilly Cooper

22. “I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.”

— Jilly Cooper

23. “Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men.”

— Jilly Cooper

24. “The only thing a whirlwind courtship does is blow dust in everyone’s eyes.”

— Jilly Cooper

25. “I’m basically a very happy person and I don’t have to be anybody else.”

— Jilly Cooper

26. “He thought of Hilary’s tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.”

— Jilly Cooper

27. “I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.”

— Jilly Cooper

28. “My own parents loved each other very much.”

— Jilly Cooper

29. “I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.”

— Jilly Cooper

30. “To bring the balloon of the mind that bellies and drags in the wind, as Yeats had so perfectly put it, into its narrow shed.”

— Jilly Cooper

31. “But really I’m not terribly interested in what I eat.”

— Jilly Cooper

32. “Our house is so difficult to find that people always arrive late, which means that by the time we go into dinner, I’ve had so many dry Martinis I’m practically under the piano, and it no longer seems to matter that I haven’t put the potatoes on.”

— Jilly Cooper

33. “And I would really like to be a grandmother, but only when Felix or Emily meet the right person and are ready.”

— Jilly Cooper

34. “We all need the pipe dream of writing the great novel, or winning the pools, or becoming managing director and kicking all our colleagues in the teeth. The world is deep and dark and full of tigers, and we need those shimmering white castles in the air to creep into when life gets unbearable.”

— Jilly Cooper

35. “I’d never have written the big books in London.”

— Jilly Cooper

36. “I loathe the telephone – vile, shrill-voiced intruder. i’d never answer it at all if I didn’t feel I might be missing something: a million-pound offer from a film company or Robert Mitchum asking me out to lunch. I hate the element of uncertainty – you never know if it’s going to be a friend or a foe on the line. I wish they’d invent a telephone which turned green like a breath-test when it was an enemy ringing, so I needn’t answer it.”

— Jilly Cooper

37. “Go to lots of interviews, at least one a month even when you don’t need a job, to keep in training for when you do.”

— Jilly Cooper

38. “It must be a terrible pressure to have to go to the office.”

— Jilly Cooper

39. “People who can write a book usually do.”

— Jilly Cooper

40. “In our vile English climate, rough winds shake not only the darling buds of May, but of June, July, August and September as well.”

— Jilly Cooper

41. “I’m bored stiff by ballet. i can’t bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin.”

— Jilly Cooper

42. “I simply adore Princeton. To begin with it is so beautiful : ravishing white clapboard houses with dark green shutters, verandas weighed down with great amethyst watrfalls of wisaria, mists of white dogwood and syringa; copper beeches so shiny that they must be put outside the gardens to be polished every night.”

— Jilly Cooper

43. “A man from the Electricity Board has been rabbiting on like Mr Darcy about the inferiority of our connections and says the whole place will have to be rewired.”

— Jilly Cooper