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Quotes by British Authors
"There is no repentance where a man can talk lightly of sin, much less where he can speak tenderly and lovingly of it."
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
"What it means is that some of Charles' press secretaries have been better than others as some of the Queen's press secretaries have been better than others."
"It's nice to see that look of alarm on the faces of the others."
"If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused."
"The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ."
"The key point about life is that in the end nothing really matters."
"You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable."
"We should be authentic: the 'real deal'. Neither a clone nor mimic be."
"She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"
"Preserve the spirit of a 'lost' age, when time moved slower."
"Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Nonperformance can always be explained away."
"Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me."
"I'd worked in Clockwork Orange with Stanley Kubrick and since Stanley was such a prestigious director this opened all sorts of doors for me - one of them being Star Wars."
"Your smile is a gift of the gods."
"We've had our ups and downs since then, but that's what families have, ups and downs."
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
"Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn."
"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"
"If you can hear the birds singing, you're in the right place."
"Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there's nothing there, it's vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can't think nice for too long-it would destroy me."
"I need Christ, not something that resembles Him."
"The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles in 1962. The second biggest break since then is getting out of them."
"Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing."
"A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool."
"How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"
"We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely."
"He that hath lost his credit is dead to the world."
"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way."
"The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848."
"Opinions are made to be changed - or how is truth to be got at?"
"I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism."
"Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; Then to that twenty, add a hundred more: A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on, To make that thousand up a million. Treble that million, and when that is done, Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun."
"He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age."
"They act as if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement of mankind is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any improvement in particular."
"Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility."
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