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Quotes by British Authors
"Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out."
"I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't."
"An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex."
"General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be."
"Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?"
"A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes 'fiction from being to end'. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns - this man should be put in the tower and so on."
"The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine."
"If I decide to be indecisive, that's my decision."
"I started out Ice skating with Holiday On Ice and just got offered the part of R2 by chance."
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
"The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs."
"Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming."
"Nurture a desire to be free from the clock."
"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
"Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future."
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
"The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains."
"I don't dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting."
"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."
"The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments."
"I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke."
"How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that."
"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."
"The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity."
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
"All pressure is self-inflicted. It's what you make of it or how you let it rub off on you."
"It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations."
"I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with, and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously."
"When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife."
"Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat."
"There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."
"I was the classic middle child in some ways, the one who could have been a priest in an alternate universe."
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