“I can’t stress this enough: The single thing that will guarantee a happy, fulfilled, and calmer life is the quality of your human relationships, especially the people you love and who love you back.”
― Joanna Coles
“Love and food are very similar in many ways. We can’t survive without them, and they bring us great joy, and just as there is junk food, and you can become obese, there’s also junk love.”
― Joanna Coles
“When you have a lot of communication online before you go out with someone, it builds up a false sense of who the person is. There’s a tendency to fill in the blanks with positive information.”
― Joanna Coles
“There’s nothing more mainstream than equal pay for equal work. I mean, it’s completely obvious that’s what feminism should be for, and for women’s right to choose what happens to their own bodies.”
― Joanna Coles
“Dating apps are brilliant for expanding your actual social network, which leads you to meet other people.”
― Joanna Coles
“I have never had an unsupportive female boss. I’ve had several female bosses. They’ve all been super supportive.”
― Joanna Coles
“I’m English. All we do is blush.”
― Joanna Coles
“I think most people know when they’re in a toxic relationship – it requires an enormous amount of effort to keep it going, and you don’t get what you want from it.”
― Joanna Coles
“The thing that I always try and say to young people starting out is your peer group is really the most important influence on your life because you are going to rise and fall together.”
― Joanna Coles
“We can’t pretend that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend you’ve shared times with together, both good times and difficult times.”
― Joanna Coles
“On paper, swearing takes on a different attitude. It can make you sound very angry when you use it a lot.”
― Joanna Coles
“Maybe we need to shelter ourselves so we see the beautiful.”
― Joanna Coles
“I think the single most important thing for a job interview is leave the phone in your bag and do not look at it for 20 minutes.”
― Joanna Coles
“It’s really important to be surrounded by people who are going to lift you up.”
― Joanna Coles
“What, for me, was exciting about America was just this extraordinary, complex, difficult, fascinating country, and Britain can feel very small. London, in particular, feels small because everything happens there, so you have publishing, politics, you have finance; everything in Britain happens in London.”
― Joanna Coles
“What magazines do is curate: we give accurate and trustworthy information. If you have a problem, it’s very difficult to go to the web and get accurate information… magazines, at their best, should be an incredible voyage of discovery.”
― Joanna Coles
“We have enormous appetites for both food and love, and yet there’s junk food and also junk love.”
― Joanna Coles
“People don’t really talk about falling in love anymore. And yet falling in love is the great engine that drives all the best art – or falling out of love or being heartbroken – drives all the best books, drives all the best music, and yet we’ve sort of stopped talking about it.”
― Joanna Coles
“Every time I’ve been offered a new job, I’ve automatically said, ‘Oh, I don’t think you want me for that job.’ It’s sort of a weird female – or, at least, it is in me – a weird female defense, when, in fact, what you want to do is scream, ‘Hooray, I want to do this!’”
― Joanna Coles
“I grew up in Yorkshire, which is like the Texas of Britain. It’s a proud free state and not always liked by the other counties in Britain.”
― Joanna Coles
“As long as you’re interested in people and things, that curiosity propels you forward.”
― Joanna Coles
“Make a list of all the people in your life, and rate them in terms of energy in, energy out. Is there anyone in your life right now who is blocking your love quest?”
― Joanna Coles
“It’s a great thing to be underestimated because it puts off your rival or enemy – they’re not on their full game if they underestimate you.”
― Joanna Coles
“Up until the age of 13, girls are confident, and they feel like they can conquer the world. Then adolescence sets in, and girls lose their confidence. And ‘Seventeen’ is really about them taking an hour out of their month, unplugging, lying on their bed, and reading a magazine that believes in them.”
― Joanna Coles
“I don’t like the word ‘juggling’ or ‘work-life balance.’ You prioritize.”
― Joanna Coles
“It’s very easy to imagine someone online in a positive way, but it’s only when you sit down, with all five senses in play, that you can really tell, ‘Do I find this person attractive?’”
― Joanna Coles
“I love ‘Cosmo,’ but I gave it everything I had.”
― Joanna Coles
“I can’t spend any time cultivating celebrity.”
― Joanna Coles
“Obsessing about my image – that’s not my shtick.”
― Joanna Coles
“I probably don’t conform to most people’s idea of a fashion editor.”
― Joanna Coles
“I clean out the cat tray like everyone else.”
― Joanna Coles
“I have a real challenge of finding dog-walking shoes.”
― Joanna Coles
“I have a lot of tea in the morning. I always have toast and peanut butter.”
― Joanna Coles
“I like to use exercise classes as a way of understanding what people are doing. I’m promiscuous in terms of exercise. You see what people are wearing. You see what people are responding to. You see what the music is they’re listening to. An exercise class is social anthropology: what clothes people are wearing, what are the new sneakers.”
― Joanna Coles
“When I was growing up, Sunday lunch was my favorite time as a child. We would have a big Sunday English meal, and we would argue about things.”
― Joanna Coles
“I am deeply unsentimental.”
― Joanna Coles
“I wish I could be as commanding as Meryl Streep.”
― Joanna Coles
“Print is not dead.”
― Joanna Coles
“I am who I am.”
― Joanna Coles
“’Marie Claire’ is one of those magazines that doesn’t feel as well known as it should be.”
― Joanna Coles
“When you have children is the most important choice affecting your life.”
― Joanna Coles
“I started in journalism: my first magazine, I developed when I was 10. I sent it round to the neighbors. I also sent it to the Queen of England.”
― Joanna Coles
“I’m just super nosy, I love trying to understand what’s going on.”
― Joanna Coles
“One of the things about being online is it’s hard to forget people, so it’s very easy to stalk an ex, it’s very easy to follow what people are doing. It’s almost impossible to forget them.”
― Joanna Coles
“I grew up in the north of England – 200 miles north of London, in a relatively unsophisticated place. And I craved magazines as a way of finding out about the future, about the life that I wanted.”
― Joanna Coles
“Snapchat is a really intimate medium.”
― Joanna Coles
“I’m sure ‘Cosmo’ will get involved with virtual reality at some point.”
― Joanna Coles
“You can’t back-engineer a brand.”
― Joanna Coles
“I was precocious, so I began reading ‘Cosmo’ when I was 12.”
― Joanna Coles
“I like being a boss.”
― Joanna Coles
“It’s fun working with smart, young women.”
― Joanna Coles
“I remember once when I was working on a magazine, and one of the male editors was going on a field trip with one of his sons. The office was full of, ‘He’s such a good dad,’ whereas I came in late from a doctor’s appointment for one of my children and was asked, ‘Where were you? You’ll need to make up the time.’”
― Joanna Coles
“You need a nutritional love diet. Don’t put the junk stuff in your body – it’s not going to do you any good.”
― Joanna Coles
“Get out there and meet people, and that will lead to meeting other people. Look around; see if there’s anyone hiding in plain sight. There may be friends that become more than friends.”
― Joanna Coles
“The treadmill won’t run on its own; you have to put some work into this. If you’re going to lose weight, you have to apply yourself.”
― Joanna Coles
“Apps have made it easier to meet people but harder to connect.”
― Joanna Coles
“It might be that you never want to get married, or it might be that you really, really do. Either is fine. What’s not fine is not to be honest about what you want.”
― Joanna Coles
“We have a generation of women who think that they can just have IVF, and everything will be fine. The odds are against you once you start having IVF, and the odds are against you over the age of 35. And to pretend that it’s easy to have a baby in your 40s or 50s is – it’s just selling women a false dream.”
― Joanna Coles
“Nothing’s more important than who you love and who loves you back.”
― Joanna Coles
“One of the things ‘Cosmo’ feels really strongly about is we need more women candidates running, and we need more women across the parties in D.C.”
― Joanna Coles
“Contraception is a couple’s issue.”
― Joanna Coles
“I think that women’s lives are multilayered.”
― Joanna Coles
“I have no problem understanding that women are interested in mascara and the Middle East.”
― Joanna Coles
“Junk love are relationships in which you know you’re not getting the emotional nutrition that you need. You’re probably wasting emotional calories on people who aren’t giving you enough back.”
― Joanna Coles
“It is extremely frustrating if you are in your 20s and you want to embark on having a family and you’re struggling to meet people.”
― Joanna Coles
“People avoid the telephone because it’s easier to text. Calls can be awkward – you interrupt each other; you can’t quite hear someone. But the advantage is you get to hear someone else’s voice. You find out whether or not you can have a fluid conversation or if it’s stilted and peculiar.”
― Joanna Coles
“I started at ‘The Daily Telegraph’ as a daily news reporter. I moved then to ‘The Guardian,’ and then I moved to New York as the correspondent for ‘The Guardian,’ moved to ‘The Times of London.’ And really, it was the best job you could imagine. You could cover any story you wanted in America.”
― Joanna Coles
“I don’t like the tropes, particularly in my industry, that the senior women are mean to the junior staff.”
― Joanna Coles
“When I was growing up as a child, a magazine, to me, was like a finger beckoning me to the future.”
― Joanna Coles
“Feminism means, basically, are you in favor of equal opportunities for men and women? It’s hard to argue with that.”
― Joanna Coles
“I don’t get my ideas from reading other people.”
― Joanna Coles
“Price is nothing when it comes to fashion. It’s all about the style.”
― Joanna Coles
“I was a member of the young liberals, the young conservatives, and young Labour, according to who gave the best parties.”
― Joanna Coles
“I was a dogged reporter.”
― Joanna Coles
“It was quite jarring to go from newspapers to magazines, and the reason I did it was because I had my second son, and with my second child, I just thought, ‘I can’t travel at will,’ which you really need to be able to do. And so I had a sort of slow realization that I could no longer do the job that I loved.”
― Joanna Coles
“The transition of a desk job, having to be in the office at the same time every day, I found super hard.”
― Joanna Coles
“Having diverse leadership means there are more voices in the room, and there are more different points of entry for people who are being bullied or abused at work. There are more points of entry for them to complain to.”
― Joanna Coles
“Managers have to demand more of their HR departments, and they have to demand more of themselves. And we all have to be open to hiring people that don’t look like us and that don’t sound like us, and not find that threatening.”
― Joanna Coles
“If you keep dating and keep out there, you keep a higher level of hope, and also, your skills at doing it improve because you’re doing it more often, and you are bringing less anxiety to the table.”
― Joanna Coles
“You don’t have to be in love all the time, but you need to be surrounded by people you have a genuine connection with.”
― Joanna Coles
“Growing up, ‘Cosmo’ was my lifeline to the world. A world that I wanted to be in but couldn’t get to yet.”
― Joanna Coles
“I look at my time on this earth as social anthropology, at home and in work life.”
― Joanna Coles
“You’re only worth as much to one employer as you are to another.”
― Joanna Coles
“At the age of 10, I had my first piece published in what was known as the ‘Junior Post,’ which was part of the ‘Yorkshire Post,’ and it was just for kids. I read it every week. And I got paid for it. So I thought… ‘I can actually do this. I can get paid to write, and this is going to be fine.’ I wrote several pieces for them.”
― Joanna Coles
“I think probably the moments of failure have been when I didn’t really understand that other people were around to actually help me. There were moments when I thought I had to solve everything on my own, and I didn’t realize that I had resources.”
― Joanna Coles
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become much more effective at seeking and accepting help and bringing other people into the discussion. You start to understand that you can’t control or fix everything on your own.”
― Joanna Coles
“I don’t really have an average day, and that works for me. If I knew what I had to do ahead of time, I would be so depressed. I love the unexpected. I love change. I love things being thrown at me.”
― Joanna Coles
“In the same way you pick idly at chips, promising this is literally your last one, you may be in a relationship that you know isn’t going anywhere, but you’re hungry for love, and it feels less frightening than nothing.”
― Joanna Coles
“I was 36 when I had my first son, Thomas, and 39 when I had Hugo, my second.”
― Joanna Coles
“Once I got to the U.S., and I realized we weren’t going to go back to Britain, I was ready to commit to starting a bigger life here.”
― Joanna Coles
“If you’re in journalism, the U.S. – and New York City in particular – is an exciting place to work.”
― Joanna Coles
“The biggest stress for me at New York Magazine was when I was a middle-of-the-pack editor, and I had no control over my own schedule.”
― Joanna Coles
“As the editor of ‘Cosmopolitan,’ I talk to hundreds of young women about the sometimes bewilderingly rapid changes taking place in our romantic lives and the role new technology plays in our search for intimacy and commitment.”
― Joanna Coles
“My favorite meal would be a big piece of steak with salad and then Brussels sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes.”
― Joanna Coles
“With beauty, I think one never finishes it. I’m always exploring. I like the concept of change.”
― Joanna Coles
“I have green eyes, which are actually quite difficult to find makeup for.”
― Joanna Coles
“I love to be underestimated.”
― Joanna Coles
“With experience, you suddenly realise you know how to do things or that you’ve done something like this before. And I think as you get more confident, you can sit back and try and weigh up the options of doing something or not doing something.”
― Joanna Coles
“Sometimes the hardest decision is to say no to something, and I think when you’re less confident or when you’re younger, you say yes to everything, and as you get older, you realise you don’t need to.”
― Joanna Coles
“I always urge women to aim for the highest job they can get because you get more money and you get more support and you get more control, and those are the three things that actually make life easier.”
― Joanna Coles
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