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Quotes by British Authors
"Don't waste time with people who waste time. Time is precious, fragile as a butterfly wing, meaningful as an orgasm."
"All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin."
"Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end."
"A rich man cannot enjoy a sound mind nor a sound body without exercise and abstinence; and yet these are truly the worst ingredients of poverty."
"To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men."
"Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck."
"Ignite the boldest of your dreams!"
"Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?"
"It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to-or you ignored at your peril."
"I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal."
"I refuse to dance. And I can't dance anyway. I'm not in a band for that."
"I was a nothing kid. Not particularly good. Not particularly bad."
"I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older."
"Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world."
"I've got a book coming out soon so I just must get some weight off."
"In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read."
"They call it The New Avengers but it's really the old Avengers with new people except for me, looking rather fat and rather old."
"I thought it was getting better and better, because the production values were increasing each time we did it."
"My power is everywhere propping up illusions, but I'm taking it back by letting go of them & just riding the stallion into wonderland. Let's see what you've got to say about the darkness in the mountains, I wonder if you know you can just turn it all to light. As we ride through the valley can you see the same water flowing that I do, or do dust clouds conceal it and block up your nose & throat? You're so thirsty for the end of the journey but I don't want you to miss the magic on the road."
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."
"Even papists could not see that a moral evil was detained in the soul through its physical connection with the body; and that it required the dissolution of this physical connection before the moral contagion could be removed."
"It should now be clear why the method of Philosophy is so different from that of the natural sciences. Experiments are not made, because they would be utterly useless."
"In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old."
"War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."
"Step outside for a while - calm your mind. It is better to hug a tree than to bang your head against a wall continually."
"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."
"You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about."
"Every person who is offered a knighthood has the opportunity to say yes or no. You get a letter from the Prime Minister saying you've been recommended for a knighthood and there are two little boxes, one says yes, one says no."
"A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate."
"Don't be so obsessed with stardom that you miss out on success."
"Only courage to fragility makes our hearts melt with fervent love."
"Well the least favourite question is the one that one's asked particularly about in Japan is what's the difference between theatre and cinema and I think, well, that's about eighty bucks."
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