A. A. Gill Quotes

22 quotes in 561 categories

• Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.
• He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back
• We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
• America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
• You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with…
• A lobster bisque ought to be the crowning glory of the potager. And this one was excellent. Silky as a gigolo's compliment and fishy as…
• The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.
• Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.
• Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.
• The reason that chefs become chefs is that they're not allowed into rooms with windows.
• Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually…
• Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where…
• I walk up a dune to a beach and look out to sea, but it's 100km away. The ships lie askew in their dry beds,…
• All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and…
• A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put…
• The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have…
• If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were,…
• A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then…
• My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while…
• Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting…

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