Lynn Barber Quotes & Sayings

I just think I'm fairly aggressive. — Lynn Barber

I have freedom. But freedom means total selfishness. It means nobody cares much what you do. — Lynn Barber

What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have. — Lynn Barber

I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable. — Lynn Barber

The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race. — Lynn Barber

I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all? — Lynn Barber

But perhaps this is what goes wrong with long marriages
you state your opinions, your likes and dislikes, at the beginning and then forget to mention when they change (135). — Lynn Barber

I think people who try to run their marriages according to other people's expectations are insane. It is quite hard enough to keep a marriage together till death do you part- which I think should be the aim, even if it can't always succeed- without trying to do it to please other people. A good marriage is whatever suits the participants, and our marriage suited us fine. — Lynn Barber

If I could communicate only by words on a page, how much more satisfactory I would be! — Lynn Barber

I was just not cut out to be an American journalist. In England, I could phone my editor and say 'Do you want an interview with X?' and get an immediate yes or no. At Vanity Fair I had to 'pitch ideas' and then go through layers of editors, all of whom asked what my 'angle' was going to be. I have always deeply hated and resented this question. If you have an angle on someone, it means you have already decided what to write before you meet, so you really might as well not bother interviewing them (126). — Lynn Barber

People say you shouldn't marry for looks but I disagree: if I tot up all the pleasure I got from looking at David over the years I'd say it amounted to a very substantial hill of beans. — Lynn Barber

I don't want to give a cool appraisal of Jeremy Irons. I just want to boil him in oil. — Lynn Barber

Everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further-I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever felt myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything ... needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to even know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting. — Lynn Barber