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Quotes by English Authors
"I'm susceptible to that sort of thing - to walls and flowers. You can probably get something more from a wall than a person sometimes. It's just put somewhere."
"What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film."
"The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future."
"The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door."
"The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason."
"During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job."
"Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way."
"Everybody should have an equal chance - but they shouldn't have a flying start."
"It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help."
"I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television."
"Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colors that are but skin-deep."
"Necessity makes an honest man a knave."
"We do not realise that we are children of eternity. If we did, then success would be no success, and failure would be no failure to us."
"When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all."
"I think a film set is a quite controlled environment and you feel like you can trust them and it is going to be a safe place to work, but I really don't think about it."
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
"I've spent the last year and a half going through a very public separation, hiding in hotel lobbies."
"The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill."
"I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't."
"How gently rock yon poplars high Against the reach of primrose sky With heaven's pale candles stored."
"I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel."
"Aargh! I'm too short for this shit!"
"I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing."
"Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone."
"I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well."
"In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you."
"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."
"The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature."
"A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom."
"Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, he had not the method of making a fortune."
"The bronze powder business, however, no longer required my personal attention, and was well managed by those I had chosen as the guardians of a secret, which was long and honourably kept."
"But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith."
"Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will."
"Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination."
"Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind."
"Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs."
"Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience, but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise."
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