Michael Frayn

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

— Michael Frayn

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

— Michael Frayn

“Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.”

— Michael Frayn

“..deceivers must expect to be deceived.”

— Michael Frayn

No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.

— Michael Frayn

“But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.”

— Michael Frayn

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

— Michael Frayn

“Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's…

— Michael Frayn

It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

— Michael Frayn

“Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door...”

— Michael Frayn

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in…

— Michael Frayn

“He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.”

— Michael Frayn

“Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities... Heisenberg: Then we…

— Michael Frayn

And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical…

— Michael Frayn

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's…

— Michael Frayn

“For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were…

— Michael Frayn

“Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world?…

— Michael Frayn

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general…

— Michael Frayn

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than…

— Michael Frayn

“Of course, one is familiar with the experience of seeing something ambiguous. “Now it is the Taj Mahal—now it is fog.” And…

— Michael Frayn

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who…

— Michael Frayn

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our…

— Michael Frayn

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it…

— Michael Frayn

“Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over. Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are,…

— Michael Frayn

“Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case…

— Michael Frayn

Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy…

— Michael Frayn

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions…

— Michael Frayn

“We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within…

— Michael Frayn

“I can't help feeling," says Howard, sticking his head forward ruefully, "now I know who you are, that I've been a bit…

— michael frayn

“She wandered moodily about the clearing, kicking at the grass, then bent down and picked something up. It was an old steel…

— Michael Frayn

“We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the…

— Michael Frayn

“I beg your pardon?" says Howard. Freddie clears his throat, and forces himself to look Howard in the eye. "I said, I'm…

— Michael Frayn

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

— Michael Frayn

A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.

— Michael Frayn

“Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.”

— Michael Frayn

“Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums”

— Michael Frayn

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our…

— Michael Frayn

“Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s your problem. You live and breathe paradox…

— Michael Frayn

“The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not…

— Michael Frayn

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others…

— Michael Frayn