top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by British Authors
"An ugly baby is a very nasty object - and the prettiest is frightful."
"It is the small owner who offers the only really profitable and reliable material for taxation. He is made for taxation."
"Some strive to make themselves great. Others help others see and find their own greatness. It's the latter who really enrich the world we live in."
"I don't think I would have been a good mother. Being a parent brings immense responsibility. It's a Herculean task. It would be almost too much for me."
"I don't really remember a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, really."
"That creates the magic, and that's the wonderment of the musical process and how precious that is."
"The world of this is a load of crap. You get all these bloody people, so incredibly sycophantic."
"I've no idea what they make of me. People usually don't recognise themselves in an impression."
"You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?"
"Corny answer is of course is that everyone who wants musicals are children in different ways, aren't they? So you think of them in different ways. There are things of mine I'm sorry haven't come here."
"Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still."
"You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre's going to finish me off."
"It was only from an inner calm that man was able to discover and shape calm surroundings."
"The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?"
"The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology."
"My sons are into German music, but they are into all kinds of music."
"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting."
"I used to look at these pictures of trumpeters pointing their instrument to the ceiling. Stunning pictures, but if you play the trumpet and point it upwards, all the spit comes back into your mouth!"
"The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional."
"After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield."
"A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn."
"It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't."
"His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is."
"Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived."
"Beggars do not envy millionaires though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful."
"Can you forgive her? Can you do that?There was no response.Because if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier.And?And then you will be able to forgive yourself-and ask others to forgive you."
"Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one."
"The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing."
bottom of page