English Quotes

Even a criminal has the right to a new life, but they made sure I did not have that. They just didn't stop calling me a prostitute for ever and ever and ever and ever.

If I don't tell it all now, the story in the history books will always be imperfect and that would be wrong.

As a little girl I used to daydream about my real father coming on a white horse to rescue me.

Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy.

'What is success?' It isn't only about winning, but playing in a certain way.

They are not your players, they are loaned from the club. You just wheel them out for a game for England.

That decision, for me, was almost certainly definitely wrong.

It goes without saying that when you're the manager of a Premiership club, you go eight miles down the road and get beaten by a team two divisions below you, it's disappointing.

I'll never play at Wembley again, unless I play at Wembley again.

I suppose if I had my time again I would refuse it and stay at Fulham because I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and secondly I would have taken it on my own terms.

Hungary is very similar to Bulgaria. I know they're different countries.

Everything I've done I've done with enthusiasm and passion.

Everything I turn up to, I think I'm going to enjoy. I never look back, so I don't have regrets.

English football is in a bad way because the foreign players here are so good, so dominant.

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?

We may have to have a geo-political regrouping or major geo-political changes.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.

The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need.

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.

Some people are more terrorist than others.

Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did.

Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed?

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.