British Quotes

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom,' only talent can keep you at the top.

The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You don't have a director telling you how to do it.

It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that's a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing with you.

I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.

I remember certain people in the audience laughing and I wanted to ask: 'What are you laughing at? This isn't funny.' Now I realize that laughter can come from insecurity. They don't know how they should be feeling.

I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I won't work in another country for a year any longer, because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can't bear to be away from her.

I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I'm important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.

Good acting is consistency of performance.

A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.

I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.

I'd rather get a good clean laugh with good material, than an easy laugh by swearing or shocking. That's not clever or comedic, anybody can get a laugh that way, it's too easy.

Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.

Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.

Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.

I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.

I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.

I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.

All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.

I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.

Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.