Daily Inspiration Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

A line like this works because it weaponizes a prim little moral category - "good girls" - and flips it into a punchline about leisure, surveillance, and desire. Bankhead isn’t really talking about stationery; she’s performing an identity. The diary, that classic instrument of feminine self-discipline (confession, reflection, self-improvement), becomes evidence of having enough spare hours to curate your inner life. If you’re "bad", you’re not pausing to narrate yourself. You’re busy living, scheming, chasing pleasure, or dodging consequences.

The joke lands on two levels. First, it’s a breezy clapback to respectability culture: the expectation that women be legible, accountable, and sweetly introspective. Second, it’s a savvy bit of self-mythmaking. Bankhead built her celebrity on a kind of cultivated scandal - the throaty voice, the open appetites, the refusal to sound ashamed. Saying "bad girls don't have time" is a way of turning notoriety into glamour, implying that transgression is not just morally thrilling but socially in-demand.

Context matters: early-to-mid 20th-century stardom ran on carefully managed images, with studios and gossip columns policing female behavior while profiting from it. Bankhead’s wisecrack pretends to shrug off that machinery. The subtext is: you can’t archive me, you can’t pin me down, and if you try, you’re already behind. It’s less confession than escape art - a one-liner that trades accountability for momentum.