David > David's Quotes

“Listening to other opinions was invariably more profitable than antagonizing their owners by pointing out tiresome objections.”
― William Haggard

“Anyone who believes he has caught him in a fantastic lie is apt to find out that the fantastic story is the truth. And some unimportant statement, like just having bought an evening paper a half-hour ago, is the lie."

--On Orson Welles”
― Bernard Herrmann

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Personal Notebooks Of Thomas Hardy

“The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“The human brain comprises 70% water, which means it's a similar consistency to tofu. Picture that for a second - a blob of tofu the size and shape of a brain. Now imagine taking that piece of tofu, and forcing your thumbs into it hard. It would burst wouldn't it?
Okay, now imagine those thumbs weren't thumbs but thumb-shaped pieces of bad news. And there weren't two of them, they were about half a dozen. Imagine you were forcing all six pieces of bad news - a divorce, multiple career snubs, accusations from the family of a dead celebrity, estranged kids, borderline homelessness, that kind of thing - into a piece of tofu.
With me? Good. Now imagine it's not tofu, but a human brain. And they're not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That's what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it.”
― Alan Partridge, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

“Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a landmine.”
― Alan Partridge, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

“The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you've written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called "They Walk Alone." "Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if," it seemed to say.”
― Wolcott Gibbs, Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker

“Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.”
― Ted Morgan