British Quotes

There were no spells at my school, just a smack in the mouth.

Television has dried up for my generation, so it's plays and films.

Richard was in heavy, heavy costume, he could hardly sit, you know, and I turned up and they put me in two layers of silk, so I played him much lighter - you know, floating around in a pair of slippers, a bit of a hippy.

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?

Oh yeah, I'd love to be a comedian. I've done a lot, but always in the confines of plays.

I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me.

I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful.

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.

I promise myself that I would go and do a play every year.

I live in fear of being a contented passenger. I'd rather get parts I can't play.

I learn the lines that JK Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them.

I just play him as myself, I don't ease myself into any role really. I stick a beard on and play me.

I just hate the idea of being well known. I know that is almost impossible if you're an actor who has done okay, but I've always fought against it.

I am a theatre actor, but the last ten years I've taken parts in movies because it keeps me in money.

A child did approach me in a restaurant in Cornwall, but he thought I was Gandalf.

I belong to quite a lot of learned societies. We collect firearms and discuss them at dinners and clubs and things.

Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

Some things are too important to be left to the private sector.

MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain.

It's clear enough that there was substantial fraud in Ohio, thus delivering the Electoral College vote for President Bush.

I've never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have.

I've had more than 12,000 emails from the United States. It's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a British parliamentarian.

I'm demanding to be prosecuted. I'm begging to be prosecuted for perjury.

I think that both men, Bush and Blair, will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world.

I have never solicited nor received money from Iraq for our campaign against war and sanctions. I have never seen a barrel of oil, never owned one, never bought one, never sold one.

I came to declare that I am a friend to Arabs, at a time when it is not easy to be friend to Arabs, because nowadays those who have ambitions and interests would not befriend Arab.

George Bush doesn't represent any civilization!

Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore.

Anyone will say anything under torture.

We say here that if you fall down in the United States, the ambulance man must feel for your wallet before he feels for your pulse.