British Quotes

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

They are feeding the world that will devour them and their children.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

The same liberty that protects me also protects members of the Mafia.

The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.

The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.

Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you.

Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.

Of course the barbarians' aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.

It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

I have got up at truly deplorable hours in the morning to confront Vancouver's Jack Webster on television because I have been told that is the place to get exposure for ideas.

I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity of travelling across this country and enduring all the classic situations that go with talking to people.