English Quotes

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

These days I can really get the strings to snap if I want.

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.

Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.

Love's stronger than fear and death.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

It's funny, when people talk about the 70s I can tell you the year of every album but when it comes to the later efforts I can't remember the exact years, it's funny isn't it?

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

I have done my time living on the run. I'm British and I want to come home.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.

Really, sex and laughter do go very well together, and I wondered - and I still do - which is more important.

My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands.

I got all the schooling any actress needs. That is, I learned to write enough to sign contract.

Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue.

Usually bad guys are much more fun to play and much more interesting to watch.

It's important to do research. I do that in every play, every actor does.

I didn't want to spend my life behind a desk.

Politicians trim and tack in their quest for power, but they do so in order to get the wind of votes in their sails.

Death is an incident producing clay. Use it, mold it, learn from it.