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Quotes by British Authors
"Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours."
"A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels."
"Our success in Singapore was a Herculean effort by the whole team. Now I am determined to deliver on all we promised. I will be watching like a hawk."
"If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured."
"There are people who claim to be instinctive cooks, who never follow recipes or weigh anything at all. All I can say is they're not very fussy about what they eat. For me, cooking is an exact art and not some casual game."
"The Government are very keen on amassing statistics - they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams."
"Satnav will get us quickly and all-too-predictably from A to B, but the path of life is more interesting when we're allowed to explore the side streets."
"My fat years were when I was not human shaped. I was a 16-stone triangle, with inverted triangle legs, and no real neck. And that's because I wasn't doing human things. I didn't walk or run or dance or swim or climb up stairs; the food I ate wasn't the stuff that humans are supposed to eat. No one is supposed to eat a pound of boiled potatoes covered in Vitalite, or a fist-sized lump of cheese on the end of a fork, wielded like a lollipop. I had no connection to or understanding of my body. I was just a brain in a jar. I wasn't a woman."
"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost."
"In your eyes I can see my heart."
"Suddenly, you are very much in the present, and you learn it's really the place where you should always live."
"Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature."
"Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime."
"We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war."
"The erotic is not about nudity and nudity is rarely erotic. The erotic is subtle, a feeling, a gesture, a mood, a story frozen in the moment that holds you breathless waiting for the next moment. Understand this, and you understand the erotic."
"I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."
"England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist."
"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."
"Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them."
"It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it."
"In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation."
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
"You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go."
"There are several paths one can take, but not every path is open to you."
"It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process."
"Put a bridle on thy tongue; set a guard before thy lips, lest the words of thine own mouth destroy thy peace... on much speaking cometh repentance, but in silence is safety."
"Always let your talent and tenacity do the talking. Never your tantrums or sense of self righteousness or entitlement. For it is your talent and tenacity that will carve out, shape and seal your possibilities and destiny."
"I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye."
"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset."
"When two elements combine and form more than one compound, the masses of one element that react with a fixed mass of the other are in the ratio of small whole numbers."
"I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes."
"The best way to move forward is to stop."
"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."
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