The World According to Clarkson Quotes

“Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself.
When I was in the middle of 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy - which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist - you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn't have noticed.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising.
Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’ ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“We are going to have to stop penalising people for making that most human of gestures- mistake”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“.. international hand of freindship. A cigarette”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then… and then what?
By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again.
I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“…it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“manoeuvrable,”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, a left-wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anything else, a story.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Did I mention the dolphin? As a unique selling point the boys in Tahiti had caught themselves a big grey beasty which spent all day on its back, in a lagoon, being pawed by overweight American women with preposterous plastic tits and unwise G-string bikini bottoms. ‘Would you like to see his penis?’ asked the man in a skirt when I climbed into the water. No. What I’d like to do is spear you through the heart with a harpoon and let the miserable thing have a taste of freedom.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fish when he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that he had no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket. Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the weather.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“And I’m not sure I would like it in Brazil, either, having to walk around in a thong to demonstrate that I had nothing about my person worth stealing.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“I can’t imagine that I would be terribly happy living in Afghanistan, either, though I dare say there is some satisfaction in going to bed thinking: ‘Well, at least I wasn’t shot today.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“I tapped the drunken Scotsman on the shoulder and said, as politely as possible: ‘Excuse me.’ He whirled round, his eyes full of fire and his hands balled into steel-hard fists. But the blow never came. ‘Christ, you’re a big bastard,’ he said, and ran off. It was the proudest moment of my life.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Only once was this not an option. A girlfriend had been pinned against the wall by a wiry, tattooed man whose speech was slurred by a combination of drink and being from Glasgow.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Stick to breathing. It’s the only thing you’re any good at.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“But here too there’s a problem – the faster you go, the more time slows down. This is a scientific fact. I spend my life driving quickly, which is why I have a 1970s haircut.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“I must say, at this juncture, that I don’t like fighting. I prefer passive resistance and, if that doesn’t work, active fleeing.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Well now look. The human being, and the human male in particular, is programmed to take risks. Had our ancestors spent their days sitting around in caves, not daring to go outside, we’d still be there now. Sure, we’re more civilised these days, what with our microwave ovens and our jet liners, but we’re still cavemen at heart. We still crave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of a dopamine hit. And the only way we can unlock this medicine chest is by taking a risk. Telling us that speed kills and asking us to slow down is a bit like asking us to ignore gravity. We don’t drive fast because we’re in a hurry; we drive fast because it pushes the arousal buttons, makes us feel alive, makes us feel human. Dr Peter Marsh, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, says the recent rise in popularity of bungee jumping, parachuting and other extreme sports is simply man’s reaction to the safer, cotton-woolly society that’s being created.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“underneath the report about a shortage of scientists was another which said that a professor of acoustics at Salford University has proved that, contrary to popular belief, a duck’s quack does echo.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“When I was in the middle of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy – which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist – you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t have noticed. Which”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it’s a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson