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Quotes by British Authors
"The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve."
"Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace."
"Once you start, there is no end to who is to go in and who is to be left out."
"This is what happens. You tell your friends your most personal secrets, and they use them against you."
"It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness."
"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly."
"Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made."
"No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely."
"The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence."
"Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?"
"The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire."
"The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it's perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it's only absolutely perfect when it's falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!."
"Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing."
"Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy."
"In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists."
"I think he was absolutely right not to go to UN last week... First things first - that is, values and people here in their local communities, and remembering all politics is local, and trusting people more."
"But if we can work with people in other parties to get the right answer for the country we'll do that."
"Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes."
"I had a burning ambition. Otherwise, I wouldn't have accomplished it."
"David Cameron is a C-3P0 made of ham."
"There may be problems we still need to tease out, but we will leave no stone unturned in our bid to make London the host city."
"In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves."
"But there are things in Il Sogno that the methods of The Delivery Man could never achieve."
"After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life."
"The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress."
"The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break."
"The best thing to do when someone is trying to argue with you is to repeatedly state "Stay Away" and video record the entire event. You may need that video for the police afterwords when the aggressor starts fabricating fantasies about the event."
"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."
"I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp."
"Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?"
"If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny."
"It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist."
"If your only goal is to become rich then use Cosmic Ordering."
"The pen that was once a gift has come to represent all that I hope to achieve."
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