Jackie Collins, the best-selling novelist, passed away from breast cancer over the weekend, aged 77. Best known for her saucy Hollywood novels and being the younger sister of actress Joan Collins, Jackie enjoyed pushing the boundaries and continued to do so, right to the end.
Here are 20 of our favourite quotes from the ‘Queen of Steam’:
ON STYLE
“My weakness is wearing too much leopard print.”
“When I’m in the mood for some retail therapy, the shops I must visit… Chanel, of course. Always great, and I happen to collect Chanel bags. And I love the [Parisian] department store Galeries Lafayette.”
“I don’t have to worry about what I wear every day because I always wear the same. I’ve got my dressy jackets and my daytime jackets.”
ON STORY-TELLING
“I think I’m a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.”
“Barbara Cartland said to me, ‘Oh, Miss Collins, your books are filthy and disgusting and you are responsible for all the perverts in England’. I paused for a few moments and said, ‘Thank you.’ ”
“Where was Paris Hilton a year ago? She’s a fabulous character to write about.”
“I’m not grammatical in the way I talk, or in the way I write, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m a high school dropout who eavesdrops.”
“I don’t want to stop writing until I run out of stories. And I’ll never run out of stories.”
“My biggest critics are the people who’ve never read me. It doesn’t bother me at all.”
ON LOVE
“Falling in love is like getting hit by a large truck and yet not being mortally wounded. Just sick to your stomach, high one minute, low the next.”
“First lust then love.”
“Men are cheaters. Women are not to be trusted. And most people are dumb.”
“Love does not appear with any warning signs. You fall into it as if pushed from a high diving board. No time to think about what’s happening. It’s inevitable.”
“We all have this dream that men out there have integrity — not a lot of them exist but there are some. Go find them!”
ON SEX
“Writing sex happens like it happens in life — organically.”
“I think I’ve helped people’s sex lives. Sex is a driving force in the world so I don’t think it’s unusual that I write about sex. I try to make it erotic, too.”
“I am still shocking people today, and I don’t know why. Is it because I’m a woman talking about sex and men? One magazine said that no one writes sex in the back of a Bentley better than Jackie Collins.”
ON ACHIEVING SUCCESS
“If you want to achieve your dreams, you must follow them, and the best way to follow them is not to think about wanting to be very rich, but to think about doing something that you really want to do.”
“Sh-t happens. You need to move on.”
ON HER LEGACY
“On my tombstone, I want to have the words: ‘She gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure’.”
