Quotations
[most recent additions at top]
What isn't written down, disappears - Alice Munro
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and i turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around... Philip Roth
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever - Sigmund Freud on the Irish.
Tony is impressed by wealth, uniforms, spooks and religious people - Neil Kinnock on Blair
If I had been born in Crossmaglen or South Armagh, I would have been a terrorist. It's simply a question of where you find yourself, and what the situation is like when you are there. That I'm a colonel not a terrorist is purely accidental - a British army colonel interviewed by playwright Robin Soans for 'Talking To Terrorists'
There was no letter from Tony Blair. Instead, he managed to find time to write a letter of condolence for Ozzy Osbourne when he fell off his quad bike. But not to my son, who was shot 31 times - Reg Keys, whose son was killed in Iraq in 2003.
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend: it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success - Oscar Wilde
What makes me feel as though I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing - Toni Morrison
Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good - Friedrich Nietzsche
We were all drunk then. We all used to set Bill on fire. His beard or his trousers - Ozzy Osbourne, railing against the injustice of being sacked from Black Sabbath for drunkeness (the Bill he's referring to is Bill Ward, the band's drummer)
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist - Helder Camara
Reporter: Mr Ghandi, what do you think of Western Civilization?
Ghandi: I think it would be a good idea.
I am Irish by race, but the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare. The Saxon took our lands from us and made them destitute... but we took their language and added new beauty to it - Oscar Wilde
When I look back on my early 20s I don't find drunkenness and I find great sexual caution - Garrison Keillor
I've got several of your paintings hanging on the walls of Number 10 - Tony Blair to Ian McEwan at a party (allegedly).
Look, I live in California. I went to school with a girl called Experience. I had a friend called Breeze. I reckon I got off pretty lightly - Chastity Bono on coping with her name.
Time goes by so fast, I find, when I'm writing. It speeds by. When I'm helping my wife in the garden, it crawls by - John Updike
They bought the car. They've got a right to smash it up - John Lennon, in response to his Rolls-Royce being mobbed by fans.
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician - Eugene Ionesco
They're learning, and you're running down the street holding onto the back of the bike seat. You know that if you take your hand off, they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and you're just barely touching it. (Leaving Iraq) will be like that. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start - Donald Rumsfeld, comparing the problems of pinpointing a date for troops to leave Iraq to teaching a youngster how to ride a bicycle.
His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land - Mourid Barghouti, on the emotions evoked by the sight of an Israeli soldier at the border crossing when returning to Palestine after 30 years of exile.
Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like - Philip Larkin
Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy and my spouse is unhappy, there is still a part of me that says 'God! This is fascinating - Jane Smiley
I love Roman Catholics - Ian Paisley on RTE's Prime Time, 11/2/04
Ulysses could have done with a good editor - Roddy Doyle
I have indicated, quite precisely... by means of commas, periods, semi-colons, dashes and dots... the speech rythms. Please observe them carefully, for they were not thrown in, like herbs on a salad, to be mixed about - from Edward Albee's introduction to his own play, Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung
Colons are manly. There's something marvellous about the colon. It kind of says 'Now look here.' It's got quiet authority and it directs you in a really nice and controlled kind of way. With a colon I think you feel in very safe hands - Lyne Truss, author of Eats Shoots & Leaves
Life is a sum of all your choices - Albert Camus
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment - Benjamin Franklin
Why don't you write books that people can read? - Nora Joyce, to her husband James
I'm not sure it matters what school you go to, as long as you're not stabbed - Linda Smith
Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first call promising - Cyril Connolly
I hope I never get so old I get religious - Ingmar Bergman
To speak the truth is a petty bourgeois prejudice - Lenin
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children - Clarence S. Darrow
It is never too late to be what you might have been - George Eliot
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar - Sigmund Freud
A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure - Margaret Thatcher
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into - Joanthan Swift
I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman - Arnold Schwarzenegger
I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe' - Richard Gere
There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style - Johan Cruyff
He must be the only man from Llanelli who uses a powder compact on a regular basis - Hywel Williams on Michael Howard (it comes in useful for rushed tv interviews)
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know - Donald Rumsfeld, winner of The Plain English Campaign's The Foot In Mouth Award for 2003.
You ought to help me, so that the public doesn't get the idea that we all make films like you - Jean-Luc Godard, in a letter to Francois Truffaut, asking him for money to make a new film. Unsurprisingly, Truffaut declined to cough up.
If he came here, we would give him a proper Transylvanian welcome, with peasants riding white horses, offering bread, salt and plum brandy - Vasile Pop, Mayor of Ruscova, Romania, birthplace of Michael Howard's father, inviting the new Tory leader to discover his roots.
Eighty percent of pollution is caused by trees and plants - Ronald Reagan
It is a great shock to find at the age of five or six that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian - James Baldwin
Life is a zoo in a jungle - Peter de Vries
1974 was actually very painful to us all. We can't admit to ourselves that something can be so important. But it matters very much. There is still a deep, unresolved trauma about 1974. Its a very living pain, like an unsolved crime - Anna Enquist, Dutch psychoanalyst, on Holland losing the 1974 World Cup Final to West Germany, quoted in Brilliant Orange:the neurotic genius of Dutch football by David Winner (highly recommended).
In the USA today a Republican wouldn't be accepted as a presidential candidate unless he said he didn't believe in evolution - Richard North Patterson
This morning I took out a
comma and this afternoon I put it back again - Oscar Wilde
If you haven't always been doing it, you haven't always wanted to do it - George Higgins, on writing
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there is always a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires - Edward Said
Let me tell you about the very rich, they are different from you and me - Scott Fitzgerald
Yes, they have more money - Ernest Hemingway
Its strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar - Raymond Carver
"Who will run the country?" George Bush, re Iraq, shortly before the bombing started. "We should have thought of that." Condoleezza Rice, in response. From Bush at War by Bob Woodward (Pocket, £8.99)
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself - Carl Sandburg
At the age of 80, there are very few pleasures left to me - but one of them is passive smoking - ex-smoker Baroness Trumpington
When you make an enemy of the United States, you'd better watch out. Sooner or later we will get you - Paul Bremner, US Administrator of Iraq
Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon - Franz Kafka's diary entry for 2 August 1914
The secret of life is that there's no secret, it's just exceedingly boring - Morrissey
The magnificence of Churchill's language serves to conceal the mediocrity of his thought - Aneurin Bevan
People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any act of parliament - A.P. Herbert
If you think the U.S. has stood still, who built the largest shopping centre in the world? - Richard Nixon
Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald - Indian proverb
I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be president of the Argentines - General Galtieri
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field - Niels Bohr
It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth after they inherit it - Kin Hubbard
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices - William James
We operate like the UN, and I'm America - Thom Yorke, Radiohead
Eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's a record - Dylan Thomas' last words, allegedly
To be positive. To be mistaken at the top of one's voice - Ambrose Pierce
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else - Will Rogers
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness - Eric Hoffer
We don't just borrow words;on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary - Booker T. Washington
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it - Samuel Johnson
When we are not sure, we are alive - Graham Greene
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom - Soren Kiekegaard
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you - Jean-Paul Sartre
I prefer homesickness to Holland - Leo Vroman [many thanks to Sjaak Commandeur for identifying Vroman as the poet who wrote this, and for informing me that Vroman's own translation of this reads 'I'd rather be homesick than home']
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day - Philip Larkin
It's too early to say - Mao Tse Tung when asked what he thought of the French revolution
We need inequality in order to eliminate poverty - Keith Joseph
America is a mistake, a giant mistake! - Sigmund Freud
Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county (cricket) grounds, warm beer, invincible suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist - John Major
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves - George Orwell's last entry in his notebook
There is no such thing as society - Margaret Thatcher
There is no isolated self, only selves in relation to other people - Adam Phillips
I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy:'Dear Jack, don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide - John F. Kennedy
How is the empire? - King George V's last words, allegedly
Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, non- operational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history - Stephen Jay Gould
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the only way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world - Woodrow Wilson
If Stalin had learned to play cricket, the world might now be a better place to live in - Dr R Downey, former Archbishop of Liverpool
To be is to do - Albert Camus
To do is to be - Jean-Paul Sartre
Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra
Graffiti in the toilets of the philosphy department at Leicester University when I was a student
All the time I feel I must justify my existence - Charles, Prince of Wales, that renowned existentialist thinker
If you find you are to be presented to the Queen, do not rush up to her. She will eventually be brought around to you, like a dessert trolley at a good restaurant - advice in the Los Angeles Times, 1983
Of course, America has often been discovered before, but it had always been hushed up - Oscar Wilde
Indeed, you won the election, but I won the count - Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua, to an opponent
Egotist, a person of low taste, more interested in himself than me - Ambrose Bierce
When I'm sitting on the Woolsack in the House of Lords I amuse myself by saying 'Bollocks' sotte voce to the bishops - Lord Hailsham
Progress would be wonderful if only it would stop - Robert Musil
Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything - Floyd Dell
I'd hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day - Dean Martin
Whenever Clare Short wrestles with her conscience she always wins - Anonymous
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections - George Eliot
I don't deserve this award, but then I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either - Jack Benny
No Vietcong ever called me nigger - Muhammad Ali, explaining why he refused to fight in Vietnam
The nation is an imagined community - Benedict Anderson
There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere - Nelson Mandela
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less - Nicholas Murray Butler
Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea - John Gunter, American journalist
I really don't think I'm worthy of the office, but I have to put the country before my own limitations - Art Buchwald
How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty different kinds of cheese? - Charles De Gaulle
It is beyond our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous - The Talmud
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine - Sir Max Beerbohm
An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike - Spiro Agnew
If religion is the opiate of the people, then the Church of England is the paracetamol - Jeremy Hardy
The Pope? How many divisions has he got? - Josef Stalin
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become president;I'm beginning to believe it - Clarence Darrow
Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen? - R.W. Emerson, American philosopher
If you're naturally kind you attract a lot of people you don't like - William Feather
The rich never feel so good as when they are speaking of their possessions as responsibilities - Robert Lynd
The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom venture to return the compliment - Sir Arthur Helps
You are loved - Louise Taaffe, a passer by, to the dying Stephen Lawrence.
I have these two quotations taped to my monitor:
Write a little every day, without hope and without despair - Isak Dinesen
I have to write to have ideas - Francois Sagan