Katharine Whitehorn quotes:

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

The best career advice to give to the young is, 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.'

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

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

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.

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.

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

The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it.

[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.

Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.

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

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.

No nice men are good at getting taxis.

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

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.

I blame Rousseau, myself. "Man is born free", indeed. Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases).

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

Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?

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

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

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

I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.

[On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it 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 food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it.

A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

Being young is not having any money; being young is not minding not having any money.

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

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.

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

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.

I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me.

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

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.

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

It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Spring makes everything look filthy.

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.

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

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

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

There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get.

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

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.

Find out what you like doing best, and get someone to pay you for it.

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

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