Joan Rivers Quotes

A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.

I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.

It's been so long since I made love I can't even remember who gets tied up.

If God wanted us to bend over he would put diamonds on the floor

I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was 'the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

The first time I see a jogger smiling, I'll consider it.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.

Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But, it doesn't get better. You get better.

People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like.

I can't like watching Project Runway with Heidi Klum. There's just something wrong about a German woman saying who goes and who stays

Ginger did everything Fred did, only backwards and in High Heels!

It's obvious that women are smarter than men. Think about it - diamonds are a girl's best friend; man's best friend is a dog.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Forty for you, sixty for me. And equal partners we will be.

It’s not you. It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.

If you have more than a couple of kids, you’re not parents—you’re hoarders. And hoarding is a disorder, not a gift.

The French called this time of day 'l'heure bleue.' To the English it was 'the gloaming.' The very word 'gloaming' reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice; the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone... Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

I’m tired of dealing with crazies. When did it become my job to manage your mental illness?

The only good thing about age is that sooner or later all of the SOBs who dumped you are going to die.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland

She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.

Look, I could go on and on and on telling you why I hate myself, but it’s so self-centered…and I’m not like that. I’m a giver. So I’d rather branch out and start giving it to everyone else.

We wanted to do it, and we did it and we don't give a damn",

I find that kind of “look at me” narcissism terribly inconsiderate. If you need attention that badly, set yourself on fire.

And when I say the Fashion Police, of course I’m speaking of the small group of screeching gay guys and fashion “experts” on that E! show led by the reanimated corpse of Joan Rivers.

I hate McDonald's. I don't want to order my dinner by yelling into a clown's mouth. If I want my face in a clown's mouth, I'll tongue kiss Glenn Beck.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?

Hey, you’re taking up the entire sidewalk, bitch!” She scowled and yelled, “I have children!” I yelled back at her, “Well, next time give your husband a blow job and you won’t! Why should I have to walk into oncoming traffic because you don’t want to give a little head?

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself; that should be a secret they must find out .

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello.

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground. And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive. A training program. This was Houdini’s secret.

If you’re going to die, die interesting! Is there anything worse than a boring death? (Other than a Charlie Rose marathon on PBS?) I think not. When my time comes I’m going to go out in high style. I have no intention of being sick or lingering or dragging on and on and boring everyone I know.

Tyra’s always standing up for herself and her “race” over perceived slights. For example, she’ll say, “You just pushed me because I’m black!” No, I pushed you because the train was coming right at you, you bulimic twit.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

Most parents send their children off to school with little bromides like "Have a great day! I can't wait to see you later!" or "Do your best at school today. We're having your favorite pizza for dinner tonight!" My mother would send me off with "Enjoy yourself. We could all be dead tomorrow.

You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

Arthur McKnight had raised a 10M round on the idea that skaters, boarders and cyclists were hot to film themselves acting out Feartoshred’s dares: catapult over a creek or a river, surf the Big Island at dawn wearing a fluorescent tee and ski goggles.

Life goes by fast. Enjoy it. Calm down. It’s all funny.

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

I hate Arizona. It always eight hundred degrees outside and everybody’s always saying, “But it’s a dry heat!” So’s the inside of my microwave.

I hate weddings. Weddings are nothing more than catering with virgins. Sorry, in the old days it was virgins; now it’s baby mommas.

Joan was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door—or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out. During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River. During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six. During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent. Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it.

Great style, of course, has less to do with physical beauty than with high intellect. Joan Rivers, who for many years has come to the Solutions department, reinvents herself season to season, which only someone with great intellect can do. She is the definition of multifaceted, moving from QVC to a nightclub in Minneapolis to a program with her daughter at the 92nd Street Y, with the style of her clothes

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

I hate people who sneak into first class to use the bathroom. I’m sitting there, in 4F, sipping Cristal and admiring my new line of jewelry for QVC, and suddenly, busting through the curtain and rushing toward the bathroom is some doughy soccer mom holding her crotch and yelling, “Emergency, emergency!” No, it’s not!!! Opening the main hatch and pushing you out at thirty thousand feet for disturbing me is an emergency.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. . . . I am a proud non-reader of books. —KANYE WEST (Reuters, May 2009) This book be dedicated to Kanye West, because he’ll never fuckin’ read it.

I hate Hollywood fund-raisers. I am so bored going to a twenty-five million dollar house to hear a mogul say, “Good news, everyone. Tonight we’ve raised almost twelve thousand dollars!” You paid your gay hustler more than that, you cheap thing. Why not spare all of us the canapés, small talk and crème brûlée and just write a damn check?

I hate babies with trendy names like Tiffany and Britney and Heather and Noah and Blake and Justin. I’m sick of Olivia and Chloe and Eva and Madison. I hope Aiden and Jayden and Braden and Graden all suffer minor head injuries while reading Dr. Seuss. Enough already with the cutesy-poo baby names. What happened to John and Dave and Sue? Babies with trendy names grow up to be adults with ridiculous names. “This is our CEO, Micah.” “You know what, Micah? I want my money back. I’m closing my portfolio. I’m going with Michael. He’s a grown-up.” One day all of these trendy-named children will grow up and become parents and then grandparents, and it’s all wrong. Grandma Tori? Zayda Jared? Nana Savannah?

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.

unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

Humor doesn't come out of the good times, it comes out of the anger, pain and sorrow. Always the anger.

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

verandah,

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

He paused a moment, gazing in awe at the huge mass of buildings composing the castle. It stood close to the river, on either side and to the rear stretched the extensive park and gardens, filled with splendid trees, fountains and beds of brilliant flowers in shades of pink, crimson, and scarlet. The castle itself was built of pink granite, and enclosed completely a smaller, older building which the present Duke's father had considered too insignificant for his town residence. The new castle had taken forty years to build; three architects and hundreds of men had worked day and night, and the old Duke had personally selected every block of sunset-colored stone that went to its construction. 'I want it to look like a great half-open rose,' he declared to the architects, who were fired with enthusiasm by this romantic fancy. It was begun as a wedding present to the Duke's wife, whose name was Rosamond, but unfortunately she died some nine years before it was completed. 'never mind, it will do for her memorial instead,' said the grief-stricken but practical widower. The work went on. At last the final block was laid in place. The Duke, by now very old, went out in his barouche and drove slowly along the opposite riverbank to consider the effect. He paused midway for a long time, then gave his opinion. 'It looks like a cod cutlet covered in shrimp sauce,' he said, drove home, took to his bed, and died.

My mother hated the kids on the network television show Fame,1 which was based on (and which featured some of the kids from) the big hit movie Fame. (Okay, she didn’t really hate them; she just couldn’t figure out why they were all thirty-five years old and still in high school.

I hate that black people can’t decide what they want to be called. First they were “colored,” then “Negro,” then “black.” After that they became “people of color” and now they’re “African-American.” I say: Pick one! White people aren’t that smart; we can’t follow. I’ll call you ultrasuperduperstar if it makes you happy, but for God’s sake give me a final answer! The back-and-forth is giving me a migraine. And, can I just say that I don’t understand ethnocentricity? For example, where did “African-American” come from? My friend Beverly always says, “I’m African-American.” And I always say, “You’re from Massapequa Park. Exactly where in Africa is that? Is it part of the Serengeti or maybe Kenya adjacent?” Last time I checked Massapequa Park was four stops after Bellmore on the Long Island Railroad. Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, etc., only refer to themselves like that when they want a big parade in their honor, so they can drink in public and get alternate side of the street parking waived. Otherwise they’re plain old Americans. And FYI, no one has ever, in my 239 years on this planet, called me a Hebraic-American. Jew bitch? All the time, but Hebraic-American bitch? Never.

He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season's blood makes the waters foul. Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before we were born, who set forth Wyclif's book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face. Somewhere - or Nowhere, perhaps - there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are midden and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud

A man can sleep around no questions asked, but if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes, she's a tramp.               Joan Rivers

But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died yesterday at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories. Each room has its own mosif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with huamn stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. there is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost hisotry we citizens of Norvelt thank her.

I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn’t get better. You get better.

As a result, wheat has undergone a more drastic transformation than Joan Rivers, stretched, sewed, cut, and stitched back together to yield something entirely unique, nearly unrecognizable when compared to the original and yet still called by the same name: wheat.

What doesn’t polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair? These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned “Lysistrata” as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.

She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.

Sacramento was the least typical of the Valley towns, and it is—but only because it is bigger and more diverse, only because it has had the rivers and the legislature; its true character remains the Valley character, its virtues the Valley virtues, its sadness the Valley sadness.

Prior to 1700, Bayou Metairie was called Bayou Chapitoulas (or Tchoupitoulas) after an Indian tribe of that name, who lived near the stream’s confluence with the Mississippi River. It was renamed Metairie (meaning farm) by the French settlers who established plantations there. Traces of the original bayou may still be found in Metairie Cemetery. Bayou Gentilly, originally called Bayou Sauvage, was so named by the French because the French word sauvage meant savage, wild, or untamed and was used to describe the Indians. Bayou Sauvage therefore meant Bayou of the Indians or Indian Bayou. It was renamed Bayou Gentilly around 1718 to commemorate the Paris home of the Dreux brothers, early settlers along the waterway.

Except for levees, there are no natural land surfaces in the city that are higher than fifteen feet above sea level. Canal Street meets the river at an elevation of fourteen feet above sea level; Jackson Square, only six blocks downriver, is only ten feet above sea level. The Tulane University area is a mere four feet above sea level, while the intersection of Broad and Washington Streets (originally part of the backswamp, now Mid-City) is two feet below sea level.

Long before the white man came to Louisiana, the Indians traveled from the Gulf of Mexico, through the Mississippi Sound, Rigolets Pass, Lake Borgne, and Lake Pontchartrain into Bayou St. John, which the Choctaws called Bayouk Choupic or Shupik (Bayou Mudfish). Five and a half miles after entering the bayou, they got out of their bark canoes and carried them over a time-worn trail to the Michisipy (Great River). The Choctaws called Bayou St. John “Choupithatcha” or “Soupitcatcha,” combination of the Choctaw “supik” (mudfish) and “hacha” (river).

The Mississippi River, beginning in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and ending in the Gulf of Mexico, is 2,340 miles long. It runs as deep as 217 feet, and at the foot of Canal Street is 2,200 feet wide. It is the third largest river in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. It drains forty percent of the forty-eight continental states and has a basin covering 1.25 million square miles, including parts of thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces

On March 2, 1699, Iberville arrived at the mouth of the river, where there was fresh water and a strong current. The following day, Shrove Tuesday, they began their travels up the river. Finding a bayou twelve miles upstream, they named it in honor of the holiday, Mardi Gras Bayou, and thus was Mardi Gras introduced to the Louisiana territory

At the bluff above the river, which Iberville considered a good spot for a settlement, he saw a red stick, the maypole used by the Indians for hanging up offerings of fish and game. Iberville called the place Baton Rouge.

-Would-be Pilgrims have sometimes asked me, anxiously, whether they can make the same journey. Will it be the same? Is there anything left? They remind me of children to whom I am about to tell a story. 'Is it true?' they ask. My stock reply is, "It is truer than true." Often there is one child, determined not to be impressed, who says scornfully, "I've already heard that story." I am immediately interested. "You have? So have I. But since the last time I told it, and since the last time you heard it, the earth's gone 'round the sun, the rain's fallen into the brook, and the brook's run into the river. Even if you've heard this story before, even if I tell it word for word just like the first time, you've changed and I've changed and the story will change." You can never step into the same river twice.

When I was born, my mother asked, 'Will she live?'. The doctor said, "Only if you take your foot off her throat".

arms of Joan Rivers. She installed him in the guest

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

Clovis then asked what had happened to the head of the man who was strangling a snake and Sir Aubrey said that Dudley had blasted it with a shotgun. “He was after some poachers,” he said, and fell silent, looking very sad. “Splendid chap, Dudley. Ask anyone.” Clovis said that he had heard from his father how strong Dudley was, and tried to think if he had heard anything nice about Dudley, but he hadn’t. Fortunately, since Sir Aubrey was looking very upset, the butler announced Mrs. Smith and her three older daughters. The youngest daughter, Prudence, was still in nappies and did not go out to dinner. Again Clovis had no difficulty in recognizing Mrs. Smith as the Basher, and her daughters as the ones who were no use to Sir Aubrey because they were the wrong sex. “How do you do, Aunt Joan,” said Clovis, smiling winningly and hoping that the Basher had settled down since her marriage. “Well, you led us quite a dance,” brayed Joan, and introduced her daughters.

One of the things Clovis had been most afraid of was being forced to ride. He had seen the horses in the stables, and they looked large and twitchy. If Sir Aubrey put him in the saddle, Clovis meant to confess straightaway and take the money Finn had given him to run away to his foster mother. But the week after he arrived at Westwood, Sir Aubrey asked Clovis to come into the library because he had some bad news for him. “Now I want you to be brave about this, my boy. I want you to take this like a man and a Taverner.” Clovis’s heart began to thump. Could someone have died--Maia perhaps, or his foster mother--and if so, how did Sir Aubrey know? Or was it just that he had been found out?” “I won’t hide from you the fact that the Basher--your aunt Joan, I mean--disagrees with me. She was all ready to teach you. She had picked out a fine mettlesome filly to start you on; nothing sluggish or second rate. A real Thoroughbred. You’d be going over jumps in a couple of weeks. But I’m afraid I cannot allow it.” “Can’t allow what, sir?” asked Clovis. “Can’t allow you to ride. Can’t allow you to go on a horse. You can imagine what it cost me to come to this decision; the Taverner children have always been up in the saddle from when they were two years old. But after Dudley’s terrible accident…” Tears came into Sir Aubrey’s eyes. He turned away. “If there was anyone else to inherit Westwood, I would let you take your chance, but with Bernard and Dudley both gone…” He pressed Clovis’s shoulder. “You’re taking this very well, my boy. Very well indeed. You’re taking it like a man. I confess I expected arguments, even tantrums.” “Well, it is a disappointment,” said Clovis, wondering whether to break down and cry, a thing all actors learn to do at the drop of a hat. But in the end he just gave a brave gulp instead. “I had, of course, been looking forward…” He looked out of the window to where the Basher, mounted on a bruising chestnut, was galloping across a field. “But I do understand. One must always think of Westwood.

Bernard was afraid of loud voices. He was afraid of the dark. He was afraid of his brother, Dudley, who tried to make a man of him, and he was afraid of his sister, Joan, who threw him in the lake and held his head under the water to make him swim. When Barnard spoke to the maids, he did it quietly and he said “please” and “thank you”--and sometimes, though he was a boy and a Taverner, he cried. His father, of course, was desperate. A boy like Bernard had never happened in his family before. He sent him away to the toughest school he could find, but though the teachers caned him even more than his father had done, and the boys did interesting things to him like squeezing lemon juice into his eyes and piercing the soles of his feet with compass needles, it seemed to make no difference. Bernard went on being quiet, and he went on being terrified of his family, and he went on saying “please” and “thank you” to the maids. But there were some things Bernard was not afraid of. He was not afraid of spiders--when the servants screamed because there was a large one in the bath, it was to Bernard they went, and he would put a glass over it and let it out in the garden, admiring its furry legs and complicated eyes. He was not afraid of the adders that hissed on the moor. He liked the adders with their zigzag markings and flickering tongues. Bernard did not mind the rats in the cellars and he did not mind the horses. He minded the people on the horses--his sister, Joan, with her braying voice and his brother, Dudley, with his whip--but if he met the horses quietly in a field he got on well enough with them.

Then a month after Bernard’s sixteenth birthday, Sir Aubrey came down to breakfast, and so did Dudley and so did Joan. They helped themselves to kedgeree and scrambled eggs and kidneys and bacon. Then Sir Aubrey rang for the footman to bring fresh coffee and said, “Where’s Bernard? The wretched boy is late again.” But Bernard wasn’t late--he was gone, and nobody from Westwood ever set eyes on him again.

I do a lot of lectures on survival. I always say you can't change what happened, so have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward. You can't change what happened.