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Quotes by English Authors
"The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams illusions wars peace love hate all that.... Accept that it's unknown and it's plain sailing."
"The difference between one man and another is not mere ability it is energy."
"I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head."
"As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire."
"To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising very slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing."
"A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer."
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
"Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition."
"I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world."
"I got all the schooling any actress needs. That is, I learned to write enough to sign contract."
"He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal."
"The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"
"I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism."
"Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people."
"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."
"One death to a man is a serious thing: a dozen neutralize one another."
"The principles upon which a safety lamp might be constructed I stated to several persons long before Sir Humphrey Davy came into this part of the country."
"Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page."
"If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece."
"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."
"We lived the life with Keith Moon. It was all Spinal Tap magnified a thousand times."
"The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.The colours of their profession."
"The political health of Britain has deteriorated very sharply. The Conservative Party must do something about it. I am the man to do it."
"A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice."
"In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed."
"When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!"
"Like most things that happen with Sabbath, it happened all of a sudden. I was intending on doing some recording, but out of the blue, Sharon called up and said she wanted us to do these gigs with Ozzy. I said that if everybody else was up to it then I would love to do it."
"She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls."
"I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church."
"I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."
"The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it's true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres."
"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought."
"It was a question of helping a man prepare in the way that suits him best. The theory is if you give a man responsibility for his own actions, then it is up to him to accept that responsibility."
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