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Quotes by English Authors
"Mum put me in drama classes when I was about 14. I'd been going on about it for some time, so maybe it was a way to shut me up."
"It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants."
"So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime."
"I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients."
"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."
"I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up."
"He hath always but slightly, known himself...King Lear."
"It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own."
"Sometimes a little compromise isn't a bad thing. You don't need to be precious about it."
"And once you cease to be a real person, you stop being a good actor."
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."
"It's great to have the chance to play a character before he goes to the dark side, or the yellow side if you will. Normally, you don't get that opportunity. The narrative of a movie usually demands that you are that guy from the start."
"One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way."
"At this period the enthusiasm of the amateur was fast giving way to a more steady commercial instinct, and I let no opportunity slip of improving my position, but I felt that I was still labouring under the disadvantage of not having acquired some technical profession."
"Success soon palls. The joyous time is when the breeze first strikes your sails, and the waters rustle under your bows."
"The corsets I wore in The Railway Children are still in my undies drawer, a prized relic of my favourite film."
"I don't think anybody can be told how to act. I think you can give advice. But you have to find your own way through it."
"She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts."
"Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual."
"The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them."
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
"A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless."
"Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened."
"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet, Long live the weeds and the wildness yet."
"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."
"And from the midst of cheerless gloomI passed to bright unclouded day."
"In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten."
"It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers."
"When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this."
"Buy a pup and your money will buyLove unflinching that cannot lie."
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