British Quotes

We were all flying around up and down the coast near Dunkirk looking for enemy aircraft which seemed also to be milling around with no particular cohesion.

The successful pilots succeeded because they did not open fire until they were close to the target.

The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping.

Like the Spitfire it was immensely strong: a pilot had no need to fear the danger of pulling the wings off, no matter how desperate the situation became.

I then realized my appearance was a bit odd. My right leg was no longer with me. It had caught somewhere in the top of the cockpit as I tried to leave my Spitfire.

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind. In the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind.

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

It comes down to the way you treat people. When you treat people with dignity and respect all the time, you can work through anything.

When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

Things go in cycles. It's like fashion, like flares go out then skinny jeans come in, people want something fresh. It's the strongest ever urban scene at the moment and I hope it can progress and keep getting stronger and be the base for something larger.

We had so much press, and then they get bored... I think we've done well to keep going.

The worst thing is always thinking of titles for records, with some reason behind them, and she just came out with the word, which she thought was a good word, a hard word, and since then we've sort of attached loads of meaning to it.

No, my degree was history, not the practice of art! I can't draw to save my life you know.

I think some people found the production took away from the actual songs, which I can understand.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned ar

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of th

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.