British Quotes

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

The praise that comes from love does not make us vain, but more humble.

Let no one who loves be unhappy, even love unreturned has its rainbow.

A woman can be anything the man who loves her would have her be.

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.

Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.

Kindness is always fashionable.

When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.

I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.

I have plenty of political views and plenty of social and personal prejudices. I do not, however, value them.

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

There are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? There are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

Do you know why conductors live so long? Because we perspire so much.

The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.

My introduction to track racing was through the background of cross country running, which is not a sport perhaps as popular in America as it is in England.

My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.

My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work.

My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did.