British Quotes

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

There isn't a single windmill owner in Holland who doesn't have a second job, for when there is no wind.

There are not the same factual shows anymore - children's TV has become much more trivial.

The public impression is that the government, industry or the highest bidder can buy a scientist to add credibility to any message. That crucial quality of impartiality is being lost.

That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve.

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!

Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

I thought Winston Churchill was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I never forgive, but I always forget.

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.

Enthusiasm moves the world.

I've been in show business for 50, no, 60 years. I was approached in school to join a variety act.

I started out Ice skating with Holiday On Ice and just got offered the part of R2 by chance.

I skated in ice shows all over Europe and South Africa for 20 years. I love to ice skate.

For me, Schubert contains the world.

They credited us with the birth of that sort of heavy metal thing. Well, if that's the case, there should be an immediate abortion.

I have never taken more than two weeks to record an album throughout my career.

I have never had a great love of the music business, I never have.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.