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Quotes by British Authors
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
"I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible."
"People like Beck and Shawn Colvin are some of the people I listen to lately."
"They're not bombarding me with offers, although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million pay cheques."
"I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art."
"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."
"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."
"I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years."
"Allan had come down wanting to do some sort of crucial music and I'd been involved in so-called Art Music and wanted to explore other areas - we were approaching it in some quite tongue-in-cheek ways and we had a lot of fun - we spent more time laughing than playing music."
"For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race."
"In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing."
"If you're into architecture and you're from the West, everything is hors d'oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you're led there. You can't escape it."
"Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does."
"I am a coach on the outside of the establishment and that works."
"If you look at Newcastle or Gateshead, even over twenty years, even with the previous administration, it has moved quite remarkably in transforming itself."
"She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death!"
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius."
"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."
"Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge."
"Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over."
"I just play to good people; they seem to like what I do, and the more they like it, the more I play."
"Air warfare is a shot through the brain, not a hacking to pieces of the enemy's body."
"Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours."
"Nobody could dissapear to their trailer once it was up and running, you were all there on the same stage. It was 10 days of rehearsal and 10 days of shooting, which was very tiring."
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
"People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement."
"First law on holes - when you're in one, stop digging!"
"I think the intelligent thing about it is that you have to carefully listen to it all to grasp it, and because I'm not in every scene - colossal disappointment to everybody that it may be - I'm not getting the full picture here today while recording it."
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