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Quotes by English Authors
"Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families."
"People accuse me of being Methody, but I'm not at all. The one thing I don't want people to see is me. I don't want them to be able to recognize my faults and failures and qualities, and I won't use those things to spark off emotions or to illustrate."
"Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating."
"I have this desire to keep improving, so I find fault."
"Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest."
"Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium."
"I speak to people who have been through so much more."
"Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years."
"I met John Lennon and he was with his wife in Tokyo. I met him there."
"If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power."
"If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?"
"People often forget this - a vinyl album could only contain a maximum of 20 minutes per side!"
"You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other, the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies."
"When I need to nail that riff to the cross, Marshall will always provide the hammer!"
"Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus."
"Being around people with whom you feel a connection, on many levels, not just a professional one, is very relaxing. Your ears are more open to someone who is not a cantankerous bastard."
"It's important to do research. I do that in every play, every actor does."
"We are different people - you get a different take on the band whoever you speak to. Somehow, at the end of it, it goes through the filtering process and out comes the Radiohead thing."
"It's nice to get a response from the artists that I cover."
"Obviously the first sentiment is disappointment that we didn't get the car home and more disappointment that at the time that it stopped the car was in the lead."
"I enjoy playing other people. It's a great job and it's challenging. I couldn't do a desk job."
"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects."
"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation."
"Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing."
"I know it shouldn't make a difference, but crossing the dateline, we weren't sure what day it was - it was very strange. Now, I seem to cope with it better."
"I get recognised sometimes, and that's really cool. I've tried certain disguises, but that doesn't work."
"Every writer is a writer of the generation before."
"Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster."
"Tell the truth so as to puzzle and confound your adversaries."
"It doesn't matter whether you can or cannot achieve high temperature superconductivity or fuel cells, they will always be on the list because if you could achieve them they would be extremely valuable."
"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
"A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable."
"It is the duty of Her Majesty's government neither to flap nor to falter."
"Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone."
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