Craig Brown Quotes

57 quotes in 898 categories

• Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk…
• Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would…
• Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for…
• One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.
• It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.
• There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often…
• The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.
• Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to…
• Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.
• I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me…
• For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.
• The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.
• Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that…
• In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television…
• Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
• As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.
• You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish…
• Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
• More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.
• One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.

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