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Quotes by English Authors
"I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful."
"Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature."
"These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'"
"If a chairman sacks the manager he initially appointed, he should go as well."
"Not because they were servants were we so reserved, for many noble persons are forced to serve through necessity, but by reason the vulgar sort of servants are as ill bred as meanly born, giving children ill examples and worse counsel."
"Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy."
"Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe."
"I remember having to take detours around the Hollywood sign to avoid having to see this grotesque poster of myself on Sunset Boulevard."
"It is ridiculous that somebody picks up the phone and calls somebody they see on television. Why don't they call somebody in their area? Don't they know about that?"
"I don't do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn't have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable."
"The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing."
"The young Cambridge group the group that stood for "freedom" and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner."
"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."
"For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."
"He couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner."
"I'm amazed that things have panned out the way they have. I always say I'm so lucky, though my mum always says, "You make your own luck.""
"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."
"I don't have a problem with my body. I'm not just going to strip off all my clothing, but if the part calls for it and I don't think there's any way round, I'm absolutely fine."
"In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible."
"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."
"Let craft, ambition, spite, Be quenched in Reason's night, Till weakness turn to might, Till what is dark be light, Till what is wrong be right!"
"The Monkees are like the mafia. You're in for life. Nobody gets out."
"For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into half halves - to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a weekday. Do you think he cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer - and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the 'dim religious light' of some solemn cathedral?"
"Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition."
"Every man's highest, nameless though it be, is his 'living God'."
"I've been cushioned against having to work, with Rocky's continual bounty."
"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."
"This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or heaven."
"When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!"
"I don't think I have ever met a single person who isn't moved by music of some kind."
"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding."
"Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience."
"Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people."
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