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Quotes by English Authors
"There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it."
"One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole."
"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination."
"I am sure that the party system is right and necessary. There must be some scum."
"The thing about sport, any sport, is that swearing is very much part of it."
"There is nothing more dangerous than security."
"I had to make a change. It was no slight on my staff either. We'd all been at Boro for seven years. But certain players had got too familiar with the set-up. I had to turn it round. Terry was the one man I could think of to do it. So I went for him."
"Its OK to grow up, just as long as you don't grow old. Face it you are young."
"With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
"I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example."
"Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say 'Bless You'."
"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag."
"I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it."
"I'm terrified of men these days. If someone asked me out now, I don't know what I'd say, how I'd react. But I couldn't go through with it, not at all. I suppose I've been terrified of them all along."
"She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!"
"Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much."
"I can't believe I've been doing it so long. In the last three or four years, I've slowed down. I'm doing only the roles I really want to do."
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
"I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects."
"In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form."
"With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there."
"Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't."
"Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write."
"It is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics. It is not politically correct to say such things....But it cannot be denied that there are differences between men and women. Of course, these are differences between the averages only. There are wide variations about the mean."
"When people meet me I think they're surprised to find out I'm not always angst-ridden."
"Uncertainty is the normal state."
"So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence."
"A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself."
"The best indication is that I still love to ski on most anything, from skating gear to heavy metal."
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