I Regret Almost Everything Quotes

“I was unable to break down without observing myself breaking down.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“And I still have no time for people who bask in being right, or anyone religious who won’t admit that if they were born to different parents, chances are they’d have a totally different religion. I still hate those who use knowledge as a weapon, but most of all I hate those who don’t have the fucking guts to change their minds. Especially about the things they’re most certain of.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Peter loathed sentimentality and enjoyed reading authors who felt the same way. One of these was Auberon Waugh, the son of novelist Evelyn Waugh. There was a Waugh quote Peter often referred to: “Sentimentality is the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine feeling.” I tend to agree with this.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Just as things thrive by not being observed, I believe achievements decrease in value by being talked about.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“All my tables for two are twenty-six inches long by twenty-four inches wide.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Humor and integrity are two qualities I value above all others, and one rarely finds them in the same person.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“In those pre-Internet days”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything

“And I still believe that only idiots think creativity comes from harmony, and only those who don’t have a clue about poetry believe it’s a declaration of emotion and not an escape from it. I’m still suspicious of those who place self-expression above self-awareness and of people who have a romantic view of art. I still hate those who don’t believe that the more vile the crime, the more crucial due process becomes.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Though Miller adored this scene, he focused on a more subtle one that he believed elevated the film to greatness. The sequence comes early on, when Lime’s melancholy lover, Anna, visits the apartment of the supposedly dead Lime. Sitting alone in his bedroom, she picks up a ringing telephone. While talking on the phone, she unconsciously opens a drawer, takes out two dice and instinctively rolls them. These unsensational few moments capture the intimate nature of Anna’s relationship with Lime that words would have labored to explain. It was a stroke of genius that I would never have recognized were it not for Miller.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Most fans of The Third Man harp on about the Ferris wheel scene, in which the nefarious Harry Lime—played with unseemly charm by Orson Welles—lectures his best friend on the flaws of democracy: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I was still the same person inside, and despite my banged-up body and marred speech, I could still build restaurants. Most importantly, I still had my reputation. That hadn’t changed. And in the end, that’s all we’re left with. “Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself.” —Othello”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“As a character in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing says, “Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“But being working class wasn’t the real reason I feared analysis. It was my absolute horror of losing control. It’s why I’m scared stiff of recreational drugs and why I’m desperate to create my own environment. I’m terrified of losing control.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I had delayed telling my Pastis landlord that Robinson had pulled out. But now that a second investor had bailed and my prospects of finding another were almost zero, I saw no reason to hold back. Bobby Cayre was a typical New York landlord, and I imagined that once he knew what had happened he’d demand his pound of flesh. I was wrong. Cayre reacted with surprising sympathy and even offered to help find me an investor. Although this was good news, I felt oddly disappointed that it didn’t fit the narrative I had of him as a cutthroat landlord. However, Cayre’s behavior wasn’t entirely altruistic. He owned a vast number of buildings in the neighborhood, and a successful Pastis would be bait to attract more high-end stores to the area. All the same, I felt he genuinely liked me. And at this point the feeling was mutual. In February 2018, Cayre talked to the restaurateur Stephen Starr about becoming my partner. I’d never met Starr but knew he was a prolific Philadelphia restaurateur. Cayre introduced Starr to Sophie, and the two discussed my predicament. A good judge of people, Sophie told me she liked Starr and suggested I meet him. Without Sophie’s help during this daunting period, I’d never have built Pastis.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“During a personal crisis, the importance of work is often undervalued. “Take time off work,” people typically say when someone’s depressed. My advice would be to work more, not less. When all else seems lost, work—of any kind—provides the one thing we need to keep going: a sense of purpose.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“When the director Jonathan Miller was asked what he feared most in life, he replied, “Being tortured for information I don’t have.” That was how I now felt.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“As the novelist Hermann Hesse once wrote: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.” (Hesse wrote Siddhartha at the Sands Hotel.)”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“immediately tore it to shreds. Two months later I forgot all about her.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Hitchens claimed: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” If I believed in God, I would have converted to atheism the moment I heard this. As it was, I’d already become an atheist when I first met Miller in 1968.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“The philosopher Pascal once wrote that most people wouldn’t travel if they couldn’t talk about it. He’s probably right, but I bet the French bastard never cycled over the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the pouring rain.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I’d foolishly told most of my friends that I was going to cycle from Paris to Saint-Tropez, and to stop midway would cause me no end of embarrassment. Like many English people, I fear embarrassment more than death.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I never knew the difference between envy and jealousy until I once read that envy is wanting something that someone else has, and jealousy is fear of losing what you already have. I suffer from both.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“The theater critic Kenneth Tynan once said, “A critic is a man who knows the way, but cannot drive a car.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“It’s easy to sermonize on the virtues of organic farming if you haven’t spent three hours prizing hundreds of Japanese beetles off your well-tended bed of green beans. The temptation to spray my uncontaminated carrots with a giant can of Raid was huge. But of course I didn’t. I used OFF! instead.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“W. H. Auden said, “All that we are not stares back at what we are,” and I felt exactly this way whenever I looked at the Vlaminck. Which wasn’t often, on account of what stared back at me.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“The next morning I received a frantic phone call from the manager of the store who’d delivered the champagne saying he’d made a dreadful mistake. Lorne had ordered, and paid for, just one bottle of 1975 Dom Pérignon, not a whole case. The manager was desperate to know if there were any unconsumed bottles. I told him there were, but after hanging up I hid three in a drawer. He arrived twenty minutes later and was so relieved that seven bottles of Dom Pérignon remained, he offered me a $100 tip. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t possibly have accepted it. (But I did think about it.)”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Po Ming was an exceptional man with a kind face and rare integrity. I once read that great people never regret anything. I regret almost everything. But most of all I regret not saying goodbye to Po Ming.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Despite sticking to the rigorous therapy, I saw no improvement in the paralysis of my right side and so quit the program in the fourth week. In hindsight, I would attribute what little progress I’ve made since not to any grand medical treatment, but rather to the ceaseless repetition of small actions. This is probably true of most things in life.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“A few years later, after reading something written by the painter Giorgio Morandi, I had an inkling: “One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it’s necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir