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Quotes by British Authors
"Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance" to be carried out by their officials with impunity."
"Smoking is hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs."
"One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything."
"One report said that since my time on the run I've had 2,500 girlfriends. I mean you got to realize, I've been on the run for more than 30 years, I have got to have had more than that!"
"Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable."
"I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality."
"I have plenty of political views and plenty of social and personal prejudices. I do not, however, value them."
"Why can't we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites."
"Refurbishing I've done in the first three years and I'm still giving housing money, of course, to the north."
"Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book."
"Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds."
"Of course, the EU is not going to fall apart, but at best it will stagnate for the foreseeable future and we will be dealing with quite a lot of internal chaos."
"You hear a lot of horror stories about proposing and things going horribly wrong - it went really, really well and I was really pleased when she said yes."
"We had so much press, and then they get bored... I think we've done well to keep going."
"The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?"
"I'm always shy in front of an audience, so I'm always at the back, in the shadows, just doing it. I don't like the front, the adulation."
"I won a scholarship with the Brixton School of Building. I screwed around, not putting in a proper attendance."
"It's my mother's engagement ring so I thought it was quite nice because obviously she's not going to be around to share any of the fun and excitement of it all - this was my way of keeping her close to it all."
"Air power is indivisible. If you split it up into compartments, you merely pull it to pieces and destroy its greatest asset, its flexibility."
"People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure."
"People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city."
"The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity."
"His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall."
"Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart."
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
"I. cannot stoop to reply to the folly and the slander of every poor Tory partisan who assails me, and I should not have noticed you but for the fact that you are a member of the House of Commons."
"You must in all Airs follow the strength, spirit, and disposition of the horse, and do nothing against nature; for art is but to set nature in order, and nothing else."
"To suppose more than one supreme Source of infinite wisdom, power, and all perfections, is to assert that there is no supreme Being in existence."
"I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me."
"When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less."
"You can't run a business or anything else on a theory."
"Our analysis of truth and falsehood, or of the nature of judgment, is not very likely to be influenced by our hopes and fears."
"Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere."
"I remember in the early days when we played six nights a week for a month and I was doing my long drum solo every night. My hands were covered in blisters."
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