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Quotes by British Authors


"Declaring independence was the most traumatic decision I had to live up to. Because I didn't want to do it."

"The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants."

"Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It's not until you've seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren't ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it's not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you're a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again."

"Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering."

"It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World."

"Because I sleep with him he asked me to audition, you know?"

"I never see problems. I always see challenges. By definition, a problem is something unwelcome or harmful, whereas a challenge is a contest. Contests can be won; and, I love winning."

"The key point about life is that in the end nothing really matters."

"He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates."

"All enchantments die; only cowards die with them."


"I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen."

"Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made."

"Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them."

"Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground - I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation - Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves."


"Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote."

"It really should be a criminal offense for an electrician to mount a breaker box on a bedroom wall. Unfortunately, I see the solar industry mounting inverters on bedroom walls also!"

"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."

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.You must remember this."


"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.'"

"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 have visited Australia several times, and I always try to make a point of going to Melbourne because it's almost my favorite city there, Melbourne and Sydney. But I shouldn't say that because I haven't been everywhere-and I'm very fond of Perth too!"

"As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?"

"I like playing accents, and doing things like that, it was fun. It was fun."

"It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren."

"The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk."

"If you be faithful, you will have that honor that comes from God: his Spirit will say in your hearts, Well done, good and faithful servants."

"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way."

"There isn't a single windmill owner in Holland who doesn't have a second job, for when there is no wind."

"When we rehearse, we're always trying to aim for something else. But we never quite succeed in getting there."

"The USA government encourages gun ownership at the same time as they have allowed environmental radiation levels to become ridiculously high powered and this continues to increase annually. It will be interesting to see where this government experiment eventually takes the USA!"

"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."
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