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Quotes by English Authors
"In other cases, when the medium becomes entranced, the demonstration of a communicator's separate intelligence may become stronger and the sophistication less."
"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room."
"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."
"I stick to my own type when I go out, and I don't make friends with people just because they're celebrities."
"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime."
"New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!"
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
"Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy."
"Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me."
"I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?"
"During Breaking The Waves, I was on my own in a hotel room. I think I would have been impossible to live with. When you go home, you have to pretend to be the person you are at home."
"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."
"Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously."
"Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting."
"I've been onstage once for one performance with four days' rehearsal."
"I've been in Hamburg for about ten years and I just feel at home."
"Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."
"If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?"
"I can't be a wife. I'm not that sort of person. Wives have to compromise all the time."
"If you assume that it was a valid experiment, then its disintegration reveals a very substantial part of what has been found since then, including the fact that you can get heat generation at high temperature."
"It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment."
"I'm the one by the backdoor - I am not the one in the middle of the party."
"The happy Warrior is he who, doomed to go in company with pain, and fear, and bloodshed, miserable train turns his necessity to glorious gain; in face of these doth exercise a power which is our human nature's highest dower: controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves of their bad influence, and their good receives: by objects, which might force the soul to abate her feeling, rendered more compassionate; is placable- because occasions rise so often that demand such sacrifice; more skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure, as tempted more; more able to endure, as more exposed to suffering and distress; thence, also, more alive to tenderness."
"Such Roots as are soft, your best way is to dry in the Sun, or else hang them up in the Chimney corner upon a string; as for such as are hard you may dry them any where."
"After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life."
"Abstinence is the great strengthener and clearer of reason."
"In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that."
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