British Quotes

I love it when someone insults me. That means that I don't have to be nice anymore.

The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles that guide a free society.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

In my opinion, any man who can afford to buy a newspaper should not be allowed to own one.

Familiarity with evil breeds not contempt but acceptance.

When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

There was no doubt that in the early and mid-eighties that many of us in broadsheet newspapers felt that we still had a responsibility to try to protect the Royal Family or if you like protect the Monarchy from the assaults of the media.

People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one's going to get far in later life playing by the system.

Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.

It was always inevitable that if you get serious trouble in any family then everybody's inclined to look at the head of that family and see if they see any cause or reason to associate it with the head of the, head of the family, why it should be.

I've always found women more loyal, more disciplined, less neurotic, more hardworking. I just think they're perfect colleagues. Whereas, God knows, I've dealt with plenty of neurotic men.

I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal.

I'm a passionate monarchist.

I would have been a disastrous soldier.

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.

In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other.

I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I'm a very private person, so obviously I don't enjoy talking about more personal matters.

I'm a Libra. That means that I can make a decision, but only after much thought.

I'd want to read the stories that I'd written, I'd want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I'd want to show that work in some way.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather tha