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Quotes by British Authors

"The Empress has been connected with the ideas of universal fecundity and in a general sense with activity."


"There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook."

"Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself."


"I was involved in the robbery for a purpose, and that was because I knew somebody who could drive a diesel train. I was responsible to take along this old guy who could drive the train."

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."

"For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded."

"I'm not anti-American. I've lived with Kenny, a Texan, for six years."

"All I've got against golf is it takes you so far from the clubhouse."

"Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record."

"It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars."

"Hollywood hasn't aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood."


"Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach."

"Governments are not running the show anymore. Scumbag Entrepreneurs are, and they have a harsh and ruthless agenda."

"True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes."

"I love changing what I look like because I always feel super strange whenever I do watch something that I'm in."


"If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else."

"I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre."


"Such lovely warmth of thought and delicacy of colour are beyond all praise, and equally beyond all thanks!"

"The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome."

"Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations."

"If your library is not 'unsafe,' it probably isn't doing its job."

"A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical."

"The ruling classes today nourish the conviction that national hatreds and rivalries are inevitable."

"We were disliked by the press in the early days because they couldn't put their finger on us, and that was the case with Zeppelin as well."


"You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense."

"Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction."

"The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde."

"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."

"Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo."

"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization."

"I always knew looking back on my tears would bring me laughter, but I never knew looking back on my laughter would make me cry."

"I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?"

"I found that if I got up on the stage to entertain the troops I could make them shut up and look."

"As preachers of the gospel of Jesus, do not expect worldly honors: these Jesus Christ neither took to himself, nor gave to his disciples."

"There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work."

"Happiness is so simple in life:If I laugh then you are laughing too."

"I don't count my blessings,because just being alive is good enough for me."

"I saw George Bush at a benefit concert actually waving at Stevie Wonder. Someone had to tell him 'he can't see you'."


"What happens often - although I'm not particularly a victim of this sort of thing - is that somebody will make a quote, or invent a remark and it gets printed, ends up on the 'net and it becomes currency. And some of them are so bizarre!"
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