Journalists

"Susannah and I have always felt that the psychology of clothing does make people change a mind-set, so if we use that and we help someone feel more confident about themselves and build them up that’s great."

"I’m calm on the outside and a flood inside."

"You have got to stop seeing yourself as a victim, take control and take responsibility."

"The problem is that women try to dress like celebrities whose shape they just don't have. When you emulate someone else's dress sense with a different body shape it just doesn't work. And when you look bad, your confidence dips. Our advice is to go shopping armed with our body shape rules."

"We absolutely love women, we are passionate about what we do and we get great results. Women see that our rules are manageable and make a real difference. I don't think we are being bossy, no one is forced to follow the rules."

"If you want to make the best of yourself you don't necessarily need to diet — you need to wear the right stuff."

"I'm happy with my shape. It's getting to a stage of acceptance and understanding how to dress to reproportion yourself."

"They're really designed so that our black coat will give you a waist, our trousers will hide your saddle bags, our cashmere makes your tits look great."

"The mantra is forget your size discover your shape and transform yourself."

"I've been nine stone for 20 years, I always eat what I want, it's not an issue for me. But it pisses me off - because if people did decide that I starved myself, it would have a direct consequence on what we advocate!"

"'If you ask any of the women we've worked with, some of them would say it's a very tough journey, but I don't think any of them would say we'd been patronising."

"As for the people who say tackling problems through clothes is superficial, I think they say that because they have their own issues about self worth."

"I think it's great that it's caused a reaction. But at the same time I think the people who are criticising us haven't really watched the show. We are not claiming to be marriage guidance people, or anything."

"Having an interest in clothes is a sign of vanity and English men don't like to be seen to be vain. That's what is so fantastic about this format, it gives men permission to take an interest in clothes and their appearance. And as a result their self-esteem goes up."

"I'd had enough. I felt so low: I was 26 and there was an exact moment when I just knew I didn't want to do it any more. I was out with two very good friends of mine, who are now dead. They both died of alcoholism. It was about 3am and I thought: "I don't want this. I have to stop." I'd felt that before, a hundred times, but I woke up next morning and I still didn't want to do it. And that was the first time in ten years I'd had that strength of feeling."

"I felt so unbelievably ugly for years. It was hideous. It affected my selfworth, everything. It was the bane of my life from 13 to 29. I grew my hair long just so I could cover my face. I tried everything, saw everyone, had years of antibiotics and nothing helped. Then, when I was 29, I was at the end of my tether. I went on Accutane, which is very strong. Your sebaceous glands dry up, you can't exercise, and you have very dry lips. But it was a miracle and it worked."

"I don't think our show's actually rude."

"Quite a few people, you know, maybe want to know a bit more about the real Trinny and Susannah. So we just thought it'd be nice to do it, in a way that's not too intrusive with us."

"Yes, , there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy."

", your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, , whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge."

"Whene’er I walk the public ways, How many poor that lack ablution Do probe my heart with pensive gaze, And beg a trivial contribution!"

"The older I grow, the more I realize what a perfect philosophy it is for life. Then, having been the recipient of such kindness —as Mr. Church writing to me, a little child — I feel a sort of responsibility about living up to some of the ideals ... It's brought into my life many, many interesting and kind things that I don't think would have have ever been there if I hadn't written that letter and he hadn't to answered it so eloquently. ... The older I grow the more I read into it, and the more I see what it means to other people to have such a firm conviction in the best things in life — faith, love, poetry, romance."

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, , in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank ! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, , nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

"Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no . There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished."

"True progress, which has forced back or overthrown barbarous practices and institutions that were the source of infinite suffering for men and women, and has established more civilized relations and styles of life, has always been achieved through a partial, heterodox, distorted application of social theories. Social theories, in the plural, which means that different and even irreconcilable ideological systems have brought about identical or similar forms of progress. The prerequisite was always that these systems should be flexible and could be amended or reformed when they moved from the abstract to the concrete and came up against the daily experience of human beings. The filter at work that separates what is desirable from what is not desirable in these systems is the criterion of practical reason."

"[C]ommon sense is the most valuable of political virtues."

"We live in the civilization of the spectacle and the intellectuals and writers who are the most popular are almost never popular because of the originality of their ideas or the beauty of their creations, or, in any event, not just for intellectual, artistic, or literary reasons. They are popular above all else for their histrionic ability, the way in which they project their public image, their exhibitionism, their rudeness, their insolence, all that farcical and noisy dimension of public life that passes itself off as rebellion (but which, in fact, masks a complete conformism)."

"In May 1968 in France there was student unrest at the University of Nanterre, which then spread to the Sorbonne, to the remaining universities in the country, and to colleges and schools. This is how the "student revolution" began, and it sparked similar movements in different parts, which is why it became so important the world over. Nearly sixty years on, such a reaction seems excessive when one considers its real significance: it led to a certain freedom in behavior, especially sexual freedom, the disappearance of standards of polite behavior, the multiplication of swear words in communication, and not much more."

"Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"At the dawn of human society there were no individuals, only the tribe, the closed society. The sovereign individual freed from this collective body that jealously closed in on itself in order to defend itself from wild animals, lightning bolts, evil spirits, and innumerable other fears of the primitive world, is a late creation of humanity. It takes shape with the appearance of the critical spirit—with the discovery that the world and life are problems that can and must be solved—that is, with the development of rationalism and the right to exercise this rationalism independent of religious and political authorities."

"The only way to progress is by stumbling, falling, and getting up, time and again. Error will always be there because the best decisions are always, to some extent, bound up in error. In the great challenge of separating truth from lies—a goal, perhaps the most human of all goals, that is perfectly possible to achieve—it is essential to bear in mind that in this task there can never be definitive achievements that cannot be challenged later, and no knowledge that cannot be revised. In the great forest of misperceptions and deceptions, mistakes and mirages, through which we roam, the only way that truth can clear a path is by rational and systematic criticism of what is—or passes for—knowledge. Without this privileged expression of freedom, the right to criticize, we are condemned to oppression, brutality, and also obscurantism."

"[L]iberalism is above all an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value. A freedom that is, at the same time, the driving force of material progress, of science, arts, and letters, and of a civilization that has produced sovereign individuals, with their independence, their rights, and their responsibilities that are always held in balance with those of other individuals, protected by a legal system that guarantees coexistence within diversity. Economic freedom is a key element of liberal doctrine but certainly not the only one."

"[I]t is normal for outsiders to have a better understanding of what is happening inside dictatorial regimes, because censorship prevents those suffering under dictatorship from being fully aware of the situation in which they are living."

"Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us."

"Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity."

"Antes de la elección de ayer en Brasil, hace como 15 días se reunieron en España, no sólo Zedillo y Calderón, sino Aznar y el juez que injustamente encarceló a Lula y convocó Mario Vargas Llosa, y ¿de qué sirvió? Es hablar de populismo en general, pero llevaba un mensaje, se hace el encuentro en vísperas de las elecciones en Brasil, y ¿qué pasó ayer en Brasil? Ganó Lula. ¿En cuánto ayudan ellos? Nada. Al contrario, Vargas Llosa parece que todo lo que toca lo sala."

"Vargas Llosa, buen escritor y mal político"

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"There are certain disciplines—linguistics, philosophy, and literary and art criticism, for example—that seem particularly suited to performing the con of converting the pretentious verbiage of certain modish arrivistes into fashionable human science. To confront this type of deception requires not only the courage to swim against the tide but also having a solid cultural background in many areas of knowledge. The genuine humanist tradition […] is the only thing that can stop, or at least temper, the harmful effects on the cultural life of a country of these deformations—lack of science, pseudo-knowledge, artifice that passes itself off as creative thought—that are the unequivocal signs of its decline."

"[T]here is literally no bastion of knowledge, not even in the exact sciences, that ideology, with its powers of distortion, cannot breach and into which lies useful to the cause cannot be implanted."

"¿Tienen algo que ver con los intereses de los humildes las querellas retóricas de los partidos burgueses?"

"We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them."

"When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it."

"Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong."

"He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out."

"Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers."

"It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it."

"Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth."

"Ahora tenemos un peronismo que es todo: es la extrema derecha, es el centro, es el centro izquierda, es la extrema izquierda, es la democracia y es el terrorismo, es la demagogia y es la insensatez... Todo es el peronismo..."

"Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad."