top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by British Authors
"Most agree, whatever their party political position, that the West can and should open its agricultural markets more fully to the products of the poorer countries of the globe. They are agricultural societies that need our markets more than our charity."
"Actors, I don't think, ever really grow up. I'm hoping that that rejuvenating process applies to me, too. It has so far. I've been very lucky."
"It's funny - if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it's them."
"I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna."
"I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories."
"The work requires a moderately large investment in technological and theoretical developments and long periods of time to carry them out, without the pressure to achieve quick or short term results."
"I don't see myself as the boss. I sing and write the songs, and it would feel strange if somebody else wrote the lyrics I sang."
"If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim."
"Well all the big companies are really panicked by the internet thing and all that, and sales went down, although sales have gone up again in this country a bit and also the big companies, because they're so big, they need big sales really so they're not really interested."
"I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring."
"The last thing we need is to turn in on ourselves rather than face us up to what we have to do in the world."
"I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'."
"I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors."
"I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves."
"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination."
"I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test."
"Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. "I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?"
"I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."
"We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars."
"I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it."
"Women are always being asked when they're going to have children. It's a question they're asking even more often."
"He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind, to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything."
"Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to."
"Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian."
"Shave off your beard and wear a dress. You would be a great female impersonator."
"It makes me so desperately sad to witness just how unforgivably wretched our world has become."
"Though we may have desires or bold goals, for whatever reason, most of us don't think we can achieve something beyond what we're qualified to achieve. Why, I ask, do we let reality interfere with our dreams?"
"A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he's not alone in the way he feels about himself."
"People are like the waves, all similar, none the same."
"Having no need to judge, control, react, so forgiveness does not even arise."
"[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."
"Well, to tell you the truth, I've thought of it often and often before, but he's such devilish good company is Huntingdon, after all - you can't imagine what a jovial good fellow he is when he's not fairly drunk, only just primed or half - seas - over - we all have a bit of a liking for him at the bottom of our hearts, though we can't respect him.'But should you wish yourself to be like him?'No, I'd rather be like myself, bad as I am."
"Having a fishing rod in your hand is merely an excuse to explore out-of-sight depths and reveal mysteries that previously only existed in dreams."
"The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble."
"One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace."
"At the art college in Edinburgh someone arranged for some London groups to come up and play. I was in a supporting band, with Bernie Green I think. Derek Bailey was one of the visiting musicians. He seemed to like my playing and asked me to come down to London."
"It was amazing that during rehearsals, without any of the costume on, the character was there complete. It just happened. Half the time, I didn't know I was doing it."
bottom of page