Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.
One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.
A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny.
The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.
The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.
When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.
The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.
This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.
I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.
Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.
The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing.
Roscoe Tanner seems to have found a way of making his service go even faster, so that the ball is now quite invisible, like Stealth, the American supersonic bomber which nobody has ever seen.
Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.
Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce.
Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.