Top 100 Candace Bushnell Quotes
#1. Rehv cleared his throat. "What book is that?"
The Moor looked up, his almond-shaped eyes focusing with a sharpness Rehv could have done without. "You're awake."
"What book?"
"It's The Shadow Death Lexicon."
"Light reading. And here I thought you were a Candace Bushnell fan.
J.R. Ward
#2. Maybe you can't have it both ways. His life and your life. How do you put two lives together, anyway?
Candace Bushnell
#3. I've never understood sexy lingerie. I mean, what's the point? The guy's only going to take it off.
Candace Bushnell
#4. Remember the stories you used to write? About that billionaire. You made fun of his fingers! Woo-hooo. 'Short-fingered vulgarian,' you called him.
Candace Bushnell
#5. I don't consider my work a job. I consider it a career. And you
don't quit a career.
Candace Bushnell
#6. I'm the kind of person who would have liked to have lived at the Plaza. I love crystal chandeliers and gold leaf, velvets and mirrors, Oriental rugs and marble.
Candace Bushnell
#7. I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'
Candace Bushnell
#8. We're comfortable with movie stars having money. We're comfortable with a woman marrying a rich guy and having money. We're not so comfortable with a woman independently working in business and making a lot of money.
Candace Bushnell
#9. Oh I don't plan on getting married. It's a legalized form of prostitution.
Candace Bushnell
#11. New York is a city where people are ambitious. They want things.
Candace Bushnell
#12. If a man doesn't ask you to marry him
or at least live with him
after two years, he never will. It means he's only interested in having a good time.
Candace Bushnell
#13. The reality about being economically dependent on someone else usually doesn't work out for women in the end. It's about being an adult and being responsible for your life. Most women have to work, so let's just get on with it.
Candace Bushnell
#14. I will not listen to you, or anybody else. Because you know what? Everyone think they know so goddamned much about everything and no one knows fuck all about anything.
Candace Bushnell
#15. Sometimes the best thing to do is to
pretend it didn't happen
Candace Bushnell
#16. Sometimes I want to be on 'The Real Housewives of New York.' I want to remind them to figure out how to get along and support each other.
Candace Bushnell
#19. You don't want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster.
Candace Bushnell
#20. Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society.
Candace Bushnell
#21. We hate guys who date more than one woman at a time. I've always believed that what's unacceptable in one sex should, by definition, be unacceptable in the other.
Candace Bushnell
#23. As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
Candace Bushnell
#24. You need characters who want things. They want love, they want recognition, they want happiness.
Candace Bushnell
#26. There's a brief moment when you first wake up, where you have no memories. A blissful blank slate, a happy emptiness.
Candace Bushnell
#27. It's telling yourself that you want the things that society tells you you should want. women thikn that survival depends on conformity. but for some women, conformity is death. it's a death to the soul. the soul, "she said, "is a precious thing. when you live a lie, you damage the soul.
Candace Bushnell
#28. I stare up the stars, intensely aware of his body a few inches from mine. If this isn't romance, I don't know what is.
Candace Bushnell
#29. Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.
Candace Bushnell
#30. If you smile, even if you're feeling bad, the action of the muscles will trick your brain into thinking you're happy
Candace Bushnell
#31. Well in the book Carrie was my alter ego. In real life, Sarah Jessica and I don't look anything alike. But people do say that we sound alike. Sarah Jessica is an adorable girl and she is very funny.
Candace Bushnell
#32. My anger is like some rudimentary, single-celled beast, an exploding virus of fury that paralyses rational thought and blinds me to everything except one single goal ...
Candace Bushnell
#33. What?" She gasps. "Who did you do it with? You can't go out there and pick up some random stranger. Oh no, Carrie. You didn't. You didn't pick up some guy at a bar.
Candace Bushnell
#34. Being a writer
is all about having something to say. And it'd better be interesting. If you don't have anything
interesting to say, don't become a writer. Become something useful. Like a doctor.
Candace Bushnell
#35. The women I know who have children and have careers, they seem to be very happy. They love their children and they love their jobs. But happiness comes out of being willing to do your work in your twenties to find out who you are, what you love.
Candace Bushnell
#36. Why do magazines do this to women? It's
all about creating insecurity. Trying to make women feel like they're not good enough. And when women don't feel like they're good enough, guess what? Men win. That's how they keep us down.
Candace Bushnell
#37. You have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.
Candace Bushnell
#38. Maybe he's falling in love with the idea of falling in love with me. Maybe he wants to be in love with someone and I've ended up in the right place at the right time.
Candace Bushnell
#39. He leans over and kisses me. And suddenly, my life splits in two: before and after.
Candace Bushnell
#41. If I didn't define who I was and what I wanted, then someone else would.
Candace Bushnell
#42. Pay him a decent salary and work him hard. That way he won't have enough time to write anything on the side. But don't pay him so much that he can save up money to quit.
Candace Bushnell
#43. At first, being with Sebastian was like being in the middle of the best dream I'd ever had - but now it mostly feels exhausting. I'm up one minute and down the next; questioning what I say and do. Even questioning my sanity.
Candace Bushnell
#44. I love things that are old and glittery, that come with layers of glamour and past lives.
Candace Bushnell
#45. I first arrived in New York in 1979. I was 19 and I was going to University in Houston, Texas, and I decided that I knew what I wanted to do and it was time to go and do it. I literally ran away from college.
Candace Bushnell
#46. Thinking you don't have unhealthy patterns is an unhealthy pattern in itself. And everyone has something unhealthy from their childhood. If you don't deal with it, it can ruin your life.
Candace Bushnell
#47. It was the first honest emotional connection I'd had in a while. So I immediately panicked and had to leave.
Candace Bushnell
#48. I said, 'Never. Because I don't consider my work a job. I consider it a career. And you don't quit a career.' That shut her up for a minute. Then she asked where I went to college.
Candace Bushnell
#49. Life gives you lots of chances to screw up which means you have just as many chances to get it right.
Candace Bushnell
#50. But that was the problem with New York: No matter how succesful you thought you were, there was always someone who was richer, more successful, more famous.. The idea of it was sometimes enough to make you want to give up.
Candace Bushnell
#51. Rule number three: Best friends always think you deserve the best guy even if the best guy barely knows you exist.
Candace Bushnell
#52. What Sex and the City did for sex and relationships, Lipstick Jungle does for success and power.
Candace Bushnell
#53. Just because something doesn't last forever, it doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful while it did last. It doesn't mean it wasn't important.
Candace Bushnell
#54. I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
Candace Bushnell
#55. The fact that a man is open to being with an older woman suggests that he doesn't give a hang what other people think of him. More likely, he's confident, open-minded and willing to make his own rules.
Candace Bushnell
#56. Grace was one of those types who never changed but only aged and had no apparent expectations or ambitions other than the wish that her life should remain the same.
Candace Bushnell
#57. His mother had become impossible, as, he supposed, all elderly people were when they refused to accept that their lives had to change.
Candace Bushnell
#58. I like my money right where I can see it ... hanging in my closet
Candace Bushnell
#59. A man came up to her. Expensively tailored suit. Okay, he wasn't exactly a man because he was only thirty-five. But he was trying.
Candace Bushnell
#61. I was a freelancer all through my twenties. I did about one story a month and I wanted to write fiction, so the stories that I would do were precursors to 'Sex and the City.'
Candace Bushnell
#62. A guy who is crazily, madly in love with you. A guy who sees how incredible and amazing you are, even though you're not the cheerleader or even close to the prettiest girl in the school. A guy who thinks you're beautiful, just the way you are.
Candace Bushnell
#63. I make mistakes. That's what I do. I
speak without thinking, I act without
knowing. I drink so much that I can
barely walk ... I'm a fantastic lover
though, and an amazing friend. God
knows I mean well.
Candace Bushnell
#64. Love is spiritual. It's about self-sacrifice and commitment. And discipline. You cannot have true love without discipline and respect. When you lose the respect of your spouse, you've lost everything.
Candace Bushnell
#65. From my experience, honey, if he seems too good to be true - he probably is.
Candace Bushnell
#67. The key to life is your attitude. Whether you're single or married or have kids or don't have kids, it's how you look at your life, what you make of it. It's about making the best of your life wherever you are in life.
Candace Bushnell
#68. Meanwhile I'll probably see him again. That's how sick I am.
Candace Bushnell
#69. Have I ever been in love? Really in love? And why is it that with each new guy I think I'm more in love with him than the last?
Candace Bushnell
#70. You don't have to do everything by the time you're 30. Or 40. All you need is a work ethic. It's what allows you to push through moments of disappointment and self-doubt and fear.
Candace Bushnell
#71. A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal.
-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337
Candace Bushnell
#73. I can safely conclude that we are single because we want to be.
Candace Bushnell
#74. And then he was there, staring at me from behind the screen door. I'd like to say he no longer affected me, that seeing him was a disappointment. But it wasn't true. I felt as strongly about him as I had on that first day I'd seen him in calculus class.
Candace Bushnell
#75. No matter what you think you can be, when you're forced to stop and look at where you actually are, it's pretty depressing.
Sometimes, there is no escaping the truth
Candace Bushnell
#76. I have a house in the Connecticut countryside where you'll always find me, summer or winter.
Candace Bushnell
#77. What if I'm a princess on another planet? And no one on this planet knows it?
Candace Bushnell
#78. I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.
Candace Bushnell
#79. If everyone in New York took sides over these petty, insignificant arguments, no one would have any friends at all.
Candace Bushnell
#80. The one thing you have to remember about labels is that they only matter if you let them stick.
Candace Bushnell
#82. Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.
Candace Bushnell
#83. Love is dangerous, if you know it's dangerous, that makes you treasure it, and you'll work harder to keep it.
Candace Bushnell
#85. That was the wonderful thing about New York: Years of bad blood could be wiped out with a single gesture of friendliness.
Candace Bushnell
#86. People are always telling women to lose weight, and then when they do, other women attack them for it.
Candace Bushnell
#87. I think a young woman's relationship with her father is really important.
Candace Bushnell
#88. We need to encourage young women to find what they love to do. That is a very valuable pursuit - more so than the pursuit of a boyfriend. When you have that core, you bring that core to every aspect of your life.
Candace Bushnell
#89. Is this better or worse than being married and living in the suburbs? Better or worse? Who can tell?
Candace Bushnell
#90. You choose the end of the summer to fall in love with this guy
because secretly, you don't want it to last.
Candace Bushnell
#94. The most important thing in business is a persona, Nico,' he was fond of saying. 'People want to know immediately what they're dealing with. And when they think about you, you've got to stand out in their minds
like one of those characters in a novel.
Candace Bushnell
#95. If a woman could take care of herself, would she still need a man? Would she even want one? And if she didn't want a man, what kind of woman would she be? Would she even be a woman? Because it seemed if you were a woman, the only thing you were really supposed to want was a man.
Candace Bushnell
#96. When it comes to people
don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.
Candace Bushnell
#97. I sometimes read in a gossip column that I was at a party when I was in Europe at the time. It sometimes feels I've got a Doppelganger somewhere.
Candace Bushnell
#98. Money follows art. Money wants what it can't buy. Class and talent. And remember while there's a talent for making money, it takes real talent to know how to spend it.
Candace Bushnell
#99. I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'
Candace Bushnell
#100. She had very little money, but she wasn't afraid-there was only one place to go, and that was up.
Candace Bushnell
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