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Quotes by English Authors
"Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live."
"I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normal living."
"Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. I can see the temptation of simply thinking, 'Well, there's a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it'. And that really won't do."
"You can never turn the clock back and, since we're talking about mental health, I would stress that."
"That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy."
"If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."
"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."
"Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues."
"To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise."
"I can remember how rude I could be at times to journalists and people phoning up for advice."
"Well, you know I have an office, my film offices. So I know that syndrome. I fancy offices, so there must be something wrong with me. Even the window cleaner intrigues me. It's a very sexy environment."
"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad."
"I said I thought female labour of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man."
"Maybe if I'd not been able to kick a ball it would have been different, but I doubt it because all my mates are decent blokes now, just normal fellas with families."
"The private interest of the individual would not be sufficiently provided for by reasonable and cool self-love alone; therefore the appetites and passions are placed within as a guard and further security, without which it would not be taken due care of."
"When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart."
"I think we were just coming out and being ourselves, instead of operating within boundaries that other people had created. We decided to do away with those boundaries."
"Not everyone likes watching rushes, but it makes me work harder, and I don't feel I am watching myself, but watching the progression of the character."
"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."
"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?"
"Seeing The English Patient is wonderfully draining, but imagine acting in it for six months."
"You can make plans but if the opposition plays well, then all your plans become worthless."
"What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time."
"Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the 'language of Shakespeare'... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ..."
"The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are."
"In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live."
"The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service."
"It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations."
"We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky."
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