Top 50 Sue Townsend Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You should only speak when you have something worth saying.”

— Sue Townsend

2. “It’s no surprise to me that intellectuals commit suicide, go mad or die from drink. We feel things more than other people. We know the world is rotten and that chins are ruined by spots.”

— Sue Townsend

3. “The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they’re still making the corpses dance.”

— Sue Townsend

4. “I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.”

— Sue Townsend

5. “I am the world’s worst diabetic.”

— Sue Townsend

6. “Will you lie to me and promise to read them? Books need to be read. The pages need to be turned.”

— Sue Townsend

7. “Every time I start a new piece of work, I spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can’t do it.”

— Sue Townsend

8. “There’s only one thing more boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that’s listening to their problems.”

— Sue Townsend

9. “Love is the only thing that keeps me sane...”

— Sue Townsend

10. “Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.”

— Sue Townsend

11. “I think we take it for granted that if you are with your husband after 30 years, then he is the love of your life.”

— Sue Townsend

12. “My skin is dead good. I think it must be a combination of being in love and Lucozade.”

— Sue Townsend

13. “I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.”

— Sue Townsend

14. “Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.”

— Sue Townsend

15. “Barry Kent’s father looks like a big ape and has got more hair on the back of his hands than my father has got on his entire head.”

— Sue Townsend

16. “I don’t know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees.”

— Sue Townsend

17. “What’s the most important quality a person could have, something that would benefit us all?”

— Sue Townsend

18. “I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I’ve got no big talk either.”

— Sue Townsend

19. “I have realised I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac.”

— Sue Townsend

20. “I haven’t used my brain for so long, the poor thing is huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed.”

— Sue Townsend

21. “My grandma let the dog out of the coal shed. She said my mother was cruel to lock it up. The dog was sick on the kitchen floor. My grandma locked it up again.”

— Sue Townsend

22. “Yes – I am usually overweight. I have had to be interested in diet because of being diabetic for 30 years and having kidney failure.”

— Sue Townsend

23. “Adrian Mole’s father was so angry that so many pepole got divorced nowadays. HE had been unhappilly married for 30 years, why should everybody else get away?”

— Sue Townsend

24. “I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.”

— Sue Townsend

25. “I have decided to be a poet. My father said there isn’t a suitable career structure for poets and no pensions and other boring things, but I am quite decided.”

— Sue Townsend

26. “I’d love a day devoid of responsibilities. I’ve often thought about going to a hotel just to have a day away from everything.”

— Sue Townsend

27. “I had my first wet dream!”

— Sue Townsend

28. “I asked Mr. Vann which O levels you need to write situation comedy for television. Mr. Vann said that you don’t need qualifications at all, you just need to be a moron.”

— Sue Townsend

29. “Measured my ‘thing’. It was eleven centimetres.”

— Sue Townsend

30. “He had always had difficulty in recognising an emotion.”

— Sue Townsend

31. “Sometimes I rant, in a comical way, about how the gods give with one hand and take with the other.”

— Sue Townsend

32. “She liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them.”

— Sue Townsend

33. “I’m spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.”

— Sue Townsend

34. “I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.”

— Sue Townsend

35. “I think it’s essential for comic writers to have a hate figure, a despot, a regime to react against, and I think Thatcher was perfect for me, I loathed everything she stood for.”

— Sue Townsend

36. “It was three o’clock in the morning. A time when frail people die.”

— Sue Townsend

37. “I am surrounded by counselors. My sister is a counselor. My daughter is training to be a counselor. A lot of my friends are counselors.”

— Sue Townsend

38. “Goodness means telling good lies, so that people won’t get hurt by true words.”

— Sue Townsend

39. “I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern.”

— Sue Townsend

40. “He was standing very still with his arms folded, staring with poached egg eyes.”

— Sue Townsend

41. “As a journey begins with one step, so a crowd begins to collect with one person.”

— Sue Townsend

42. “At four o’clock I had one of those rare moments of happiness that I will remember all my life. I was sitting in front of Grandma’s electric coal fire eating dripping toast and reading the News of the World. There was a good play on Radio Four about torturing in concentration camps. Grandma was asleep and the dog was being quiet. All at once I felt this dead good feeling. Perhaps I am turning religious. I think I have got it in me to be a Saint of some kind.”

— Sue Townsend

43. “I couldn’t think of anything to say so I kept quiet. I still can’t think of anything to say so I am going to sleep.”

— Sue Townsend

44. “I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I’d become professional and my life would be transformed.”

— Sue Townsend

45. “In my opinion it is essential to get lost in a new city, that way you are forced to walk about and discover places at a proper, natural pace. But you must have the taxi fare home, and it helps if you can remember the name of your hotel.”

— Sue Townsend

46. “Nothing was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed.”

— Sue Townsend

47. “I’ve been a bit worried about my maleness lately, somewhere along the line I seem to have picked up too many female hormones.”

— Sue Townsend

48. “Your trouble is, you want to be happy all the time. You’re fifty years old – haven’t you realized yet that most of the time most of us just trudge through life? Happy days are few and far between.”

— Sue Townsend

49. “Just measured my thing. It has grown one centimetre. I might be needing it soon.”

— Sue Townsend

50. “Brian kept the photograph inside an Old Bible. He knew it would be safe there. Nobody ever opened it.”

— Sue Townsend