Julie Burchill Quotes

Will [Self] loomed over my second marriage, lurked throughout my very enjoyable six months of lesbianism, and has seen considerable active service in my rich and strange inner life over the years since then.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.... Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. . . Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination. . . Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those [five] abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life - mine.

A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be with and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

The only kind of socialist to be is a Stalinist, and the only kind of woman to be is a Bitch.

It has been said (by Shelley Winters) that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not - it's a visa, and it runs out fast.

I got through the sexual side of my first marriage - for six years! - by pretending that my husband was my friend Peter York.

We may be saddled with Bush and Blair, but you've got Prince Charles (a big friend of the Islamic world, probably because of its large number of feudal kingdoms and hardline attitude to uppity women), the Catholic church (taking a brief break from buggering babies to condemn any western attack as "morally unacceptable") and posturing pansies such as Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow and Damon Albarn.

Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index.

A good part — and definitely the most fun part — of being a feminist is about frightening men. American and Australian feminists have always known this, and absorbed it cheerfully into their act; one thinks of julienning men on phone- in shows, or telling us that a good feminist is rude to a man at least three times a day on principle. Of course, there's a lot more to feminism... but scaring the shit out of scumbags is an amusing and necessary part because, sadly, a good many men still respect nothing but strength,

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.