Daily Inspiration Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

Bankhead’s line lands because it treats “virtue” as a clerical hobby and “vice” as a scheduling problem. The joke is an inversion with teeth: the “good girl” is so carefully managed she has time to document herself, while the “bad girl” is too busy living to curate a narrative. It’s flippant, but it’s also a sly critique of how femininity gets policed. Diaries are supposed to be private, yet they’re also a training ground for self-surveillance: be reflective, be remorseful, be legible. Bankhead turns that expectation into a punchline.

The subtext is pure performance. “Good” and “bad” aren’t moral categories here; they’re roles with different workloads. The good girl performs respectability, and the diary becomes props and proof. The bad girl performs freedom, and her “never have the time” implies a life lived in public, in motion, unaccountable to anyone’s record-keeping. It’s a glamorous dodge, but also a refusal: you can’t indict me with my own sentences if I never write them down.

Context matters because Bankhead was a celebrity whose brand was appetite, candor, and a blasé relationship to scandal. In early-to-mid 20th-century culture, women were expected to be both innocent and narratable. Bankhead’s wit cuts through that double bind by making “badness” sound like competence: too many nights, too many choices, too little interest in tidy self-explanation. The line sells transgression as time management, and that’s exactly why it sticks.