Today people need to be reminded that the choice is not between legal abortion and the supposedly edifying effects of bringing up an unwanted child. The choice is between legal abortion and illegal abortion. To know something of what an illegal abortion was like, you didn't need to have seen a girl's corpse after an unsuccessful operation. All you needed to have seen was a girl's face on the way to a successful one.
Clive James, Falling Towards England

...even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt; that's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.
Phil Ochs

...his little packet (accurately compounded and hygienically wrapped by a couple of fellows putting themselves through grad school in chemistry by the approved American method of free enterprise, illegitimate to be sure but this is not unusual in America where so little is legal that even a baby can be illegitimate)...
Ursula LeGuin, The Good Trip

Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. An adventure is interesting enough - in retrospect. Especially to the person who didn't have it.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My life with the Esquimo

It will be seen that the best defence against both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri is (sic) read advertisements carefully, observing both what is said and what is omitted. Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds. Caveat emptor.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Psychology of Advertising in The Spectator 19.11.1937

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
I.F. Stone, The Observer 20.3.1988

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.
Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile (8.5.1935)

Cacher son âge, c'est renier ses souvenirs.
Arletty

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

The Cockney Alphabet

• A is for 'orses
• B for mutton
• C for th'Highlanders
• D for dumb
• E for Adam
• F for vescent
• G for Police
• H 'fore beauty
• I for Novello
• J for oranges
• K for a cuppa
• L for leather
• M for sis
• N for eggs
• O for the wings of a dove
• P for a penny
• Q for a bus
• R for mo'
• S for you
• T for two
• U for me
• V for la France
• W for a quid
• X for breakfast
• Y for 'usband
• Z for breezes

[Amanda Foreman] has the clear delivery and scholarly mind of one of those people who could lose themselves for days in the British Museum without once looking for the mummified cats.
Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 03.09.2015

That was always my dream - to become the Salad King of New England.
Paul Newman, Time Out 17.8.1994

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
Odo (Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed)

People ask me, How do you become an anarchist? Well, it's not easy. You can't rearrange the whole fabric of western civilisation just like that. For a start, it's against the law. You'll need to practice. To begin with, try breaking a few little laws: ride your bike at night with no lights on; walk on the grass. Then, as you get more confident, move on to bigger things: commit a public nuisance; disturb the queen's peace. Keep practising, and before long you'll be robbing banks and overthrowing governments!
Jim Huggon, Hyde Park Anarchist Forum, 1981; quoted in Speakers' Corner: Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace by Philip Wolmuth

That evening, talking with Padre Agustín, there was no doubt at all in my mind that the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos was among the most radiantly beautiful places on earth. Should I perhaps have been disturbed by my own very peace of mind? Here was I, after all, an atheist, brought up tepid C of E and now standing in a Roman Catholic monastery chatting to a monk who referred to my home city of London (albeit chucklingly) as "Babylon", and I dared to experience such a thing as peace of mind. But the thought did not disturb me. I merely became aware of how few secular buildings in the world were capable of inducing such a condition of peace. Why, asked General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, should the Devil have all the best tunes? And why, I felt, should God have all the best buildings?
Edwin Mullins, The Pilgrimage to Santiago

There is nothing worth living for but Christian architecture and boats.
A. W. N. Pugin

Armagnac, at the ordinary three-star level, as superior to average Cognac, in my view, as wholewheat bread is to white-sliced;...
Edwin Mullins, The Pilgrimage to Santiago

Art is whatever you choose to frame.
Fleur Adcock, interviewed in The Guardian, summer 2000

Being an artist is as much about what you can see in the world around you as what you create. I look outside now and I can see how truly beautiful the light is. That's what makes me an artist.
Tracey Emin, The Guardian, 09.07.2004

Long ago he and I had come to the conclusion that the only people in life that were truly worth knowing were the assholes. They're usually smarter and more consistent, and you never waste any time wondering if they're just trying to be nice.
Kinky Friedman, Roadkill

One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.
Alan Bennett, Larkin at Sixty

George also had his Thomas the Tank Engine phase. An admiration for the works of Rev W Awdry is almost a diagnostic requirement of autism. It's easy to see why the engines appeal to a systemising brain. They each have a name, a number, a colour (though sometimes, alarmingly, they go for a respray), a similar-but-different shape, a designated function. Their faces are broad and clear, their range of expressions limited and well defined. It's easier for the autistic child to see that Gordon is cross or Percy is mischievous than it is for him to judge the moods of his own mother.
Charlotte Moore, George And Sam: Autism In The Family

Mention that you don't like bacon and people will get pretty animated about it. They'll quiz you about it, or insist you actually do like it, or offer you new ways to cook it, or cook some in front of you and try to make you eat it.

Apparently Pratchett is the bacon of literature.
Justin Boden, comment in Charlie's Diary, 31.1.2014

Bal-ham, Gateway to the South.
Frank Muir and Denis Norden, monologue in Third Division
as performed by Peter Sellers
full text

Come to think of it, ballet has a lot in common with superhero comics, the story being merely an excuse, a framework to show off the artist's skill with the form. That and the melodrama...
...the acrobatics...
...and the tights.
Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (pre-publication)

The BBC will have no reliable influence on anything unless it is perceived as truthful, and this implied not only that it tells the truth when it deals with reality, but that it quite often deals with reality.
Bernard Williams, Violence and the Media

It is too beautiful. I cannot bear it.
Giles Gilbert Scott, on the completed St. Pancras Station

"Why, Oscar," he said, "it always seems to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction."
Attributed to Walt Whitman by Lewis Broad, in The Truth about Oscar Wilde

Here I sit, alone and sixty,
Bald and fat, and full of sin;
Cold the seat and loud the cistern
As I read the Harpic tin.

...and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster, What I believe

I understand it as bias and only bias... It is impossible to create without acknowledging on what latent feelings and passions you wish to speculate - excuse the expression... For me, bias is a great artistic potential, though it need not always be as political... as in Potemkin. When the film is regarded as a simple time-killer, as a sedative or hypnotic, then absence of bias can be interpreted as quite biased in the maintaining of tranquillity and keeping the audience satisfied with conditions as they are... Isn't this the philosophy of the American "happy ending"?
Sergei Eisenstein, quoted in The Observer Magazine 7.2.1988

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts I do understand.
Mark Twain

There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
ThinkGeek

"The only thing you really have to know is the difference between on and off," he said. "Night and day. Right and left. In and out. Down and up. Beat and rest."
Pat Cadigan, Synners

I cling to the birdshit-streaked chain link, where convicts had marked off the days of their sentence in chalk on penitentiary walls.
Alan Moore, Marvelman #11

It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything.
Katharine Whitehorn, Faster, Faster

aut liberi aut libri
Nietzsche

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27.1.1904

Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin.
James Meek, The story of borshch, The Guardian 15.3.2008

Diana! Bring me my sword and my mascara.
Then you can let down my braids. My people need a Boudicca.
Bryan Talbot, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, part 8

The harder one stares into the machinery of the brain, the starker the realisation that there is no one in there. There is no inner sanctum of the self. Neural networks have a life and logic of their own. There is no one running the show. The self is a shadow-puppet shaped by the firings of a hundred billion brain cells. These are conceptual conundrums. Intractable to current science, they call for an artistic response.
Paul Broks, essay for Susan Aldworth's Scribing the Soul exhibition catalogue.

Fermer les maisons closes, c'est bien pire qu'un crime, c'est un pléonasme.
Arletty

Tell me, how many of your drivers own their own buses?
Nicholas Ridley, visiting a bus garage on Tyneside, The Guardian 20.9.1984

Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.
Gerard Groote, Devotio Moderna, quoted by Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror

Lipp lipi peal, lapp lapi peal, ilma nöela pistmata
[Translation: patch on patch, piece on piece, without using a needle]
Estonian riddle

The French Revolutionary calendar:

The year begins at the autumn equinox:

Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire,
Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse,
Germinal, Floréal, Prairial,
Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor.

In English, beginning in January with Nivôse:

Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,
Showery, Flowery, Bowery,
Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy,
Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy

- I've had teapot stands in this shop as camp as a row of pink tents.
- Really?
- I tell a lie - as camp as a row of pink frilly tents.
Alan Bennett, On the Margin

...We're America's drinking buddy.

Once more, we're at the bar, it's getting ready to close, and the US is eying some guy across the room, saying, "What are you lookin' at?"

We try and get him to calm down and come home and sleep it off but he's not having any of it. And the more the other guy says he doesn't want to fight, the madder the US gets.

And then, after the fight, we're right back doing what we always do: apologizing for our buddy's temper and showing up the morning after to help clean up the mess... and try and keep the peace.
Mark Critch, from the television program This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 04.03.2003

From each according to his stupidity, to each according to his greed.
Philip Roth, The Great American Novel

Late capitalism is like arguing with a teenager. Its gambit on matters of fairness and dignity is "Why should I?" and its logical endpoint is "robots".
Zoe Williams, The Guardian 21.05.2021

Si non caste, tamen caute.

Hands up who thinks Martin's playing too loud. He always played too loud and thought he was Jimi Hendrix.
Ashley Hutchings, The Guardian 4.9.1995

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Attributed to Hal Wallis, spoken by Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca

"The Formula" is this:
When any member company is offered the screen rights to a book or play of a probably questionable nature, its representatives immediately inform the offices of our Association, representing about eighty-five per cent of the producing elements. If the judgement of the member company to the effect that the picturization of the subject matter is confirmed, a notice is sent to all the other member companies, giving the name of the objectionable book or play. Such company members, thus having their attention directed to the subject in question, have the opportunity of avoiding the picturization of the novel or play.
More than a hundred and fifty books and plays, including some of the best sellers and stage successes, have thus been kept from the screen.
This method, which is of course thoroughly legal and which has proved efficient, is not censorship in any sense of the word. No censorship could have brought about the results which have been attained.
Will Hays, quoted by Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson

This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.
Attributed to the British Board of Film Censors, about La Coquille et le Clergyman, (1929, directed by Germaine Dulac, written by Antonin Artaud)

...il s'est établi dans Madrid un système de liberté sur la vente des productions, qui s'étend même à celles de la presse; et que, pourvu que je ne parle en mes écrits ni de l'autorité, ni du culte, ni de la politique, ni de la morale, ni des gens en place, ni des corps en crédit, ni de l'Opéra, ni des autres spectacles, ni de personne qui tienne à quelque chose, je puis tout imprimer librement, sous l'inspection de deux ou trois censeurs.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, V iii

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
AJ Liebling

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton, Areopagitica

Lord Cobbold, a banker who had been Lord Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household since 1963, was a charming gentleman who seemed prepared to give up his onerous theatrical duties without too much of a struggle. When I asked him what subject he would be most likely to ban in a play, irrespective of its merits as a work of art, he answered with the single word "Regicide", which seemed to rule out a good deal of Greek drama as well as many of the works of Shakespeare.
John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage

My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne.
John Maynard Keynes (attr.)

C'est une des principales obligations que j'aie à ma fortune, que le cours de mon état corporel ait été conduit, chaque chose en sa saison. J'en ai vu l'herbe et les fleurs et le fruit: et en vois la secheresse. Heureusement, puisque c'est naturellement. Je porte bien plus doucement les maux que j'aie, d'autant qu'ils sont en leur point et qu'ils me font aussi plus favorablement souvenir de la longue félicité de ma vie passée.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 2: Du Repentir

"Change for the machines." She sighed heavily. "That's all we've ever done is change for the machines. But this is the last time. We've finally changed enough that the machines will be making all the changes from now on."
Pat Cadigan, Synners

Bread and cheese. Food of the gods. Olympus practically ran on Wensleydale.
Neil Gaiman, Sandman, The Wake

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.
Clifton Fadiman, Any Number Can Play

"Marooned three years agone," he continued, "and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly - and woke up again, and here I were."
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

The ultimate salad cheese is feta, not parmesan; parmesan works with everything, whereas feta is like an awkward adolescent that keeps falling out with everyone, until it finally finds a youth club (cucumbers) where it can really be itself.
Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 15.08.2019

In the evening we went back to Harry's Bar, where our host regaled us with a drink compounded of champagne and cherry brandy. "To have the right effect," said Harry confidentially, "it must be the worst cherry brandy." It was.
Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana, diary for 21.08.1933

Chess is probably the only game in the world that cannot attract a single spectator - they are all participants.
Waldemar Januschak, The Guardian 25.8.1986

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.
Saki, Reginald on Christmas Presents

Kosmopolites eimi [I am a citizen of the world].
Diogenes

Clarke's Law:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

He [Gromit] was going to have a mouth and do a lot of growling, but I soon saw how hard that was, so I started tweaking his eyebrows instead - and that did everything. With clay, you can create character out of tiny nuances. Gromit was born out of clay, really. If he'd been designed by computer, I'd never have arrived at him.
Nick Park, The Guardian, 04.03.2014

John's middle name is Marwood, but he never used it. It is a shame. I don't know why. He used to call himself Otto at one time. I don't know why. It was when he went a bit mad. My husband and I used to say he was always going a bit mad, with that Python programme especially, but he's done all right for himself. He grew very quickly as a boy. His clothes and his feet were a great worry. I don't think his feet are as big these days. They must have shrunk.
Mrs Cleese, to the Sunday Times

Coca Cola = Ke Kou Ke La = Bite the Wax Tadpole

Dear Sir,
I assure you that Mr Player was wrong in supposing that I thought you purchased inferior coffee. I thought I said to him that I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I did not believe you had coffee in the place: I am certain that I never tasted any. I have long ceased to make complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, letter (1840) about GWR catering

A story is told of Prince Bismarck who, when in France with the Prussian army, entered a country inn one day and asked the host if he had any chicory in the house. He had.
"Bring it all then! All you have!"
The man obeyed, and brought a full canister and a couple of small boxes, half filled with chicory.
"Are you sure this is all you have?" asked the chancellor.
"Yes, my lord, every grain."
"Then," said Bismarck, "leave this here and now go and make me a pot of coffee."
Claudia Roden, Coffee (London, 1977)

Le café est un torréfiant intérieur. Beaucoup de gens accordent au café le pouvoir de donner de l'esprit ; mais tout le monde a pu vérifier que les ennuyeux ennuient bien davantage après en avoir pris. Enfin, quoique les épiciers soient ouverts à Paris jusqu'à minuit, certains auteurs n'en deviennent pas plus spirituels.
Honoré de Balzac, Traité des excitants modernes, (1838)

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Alfréd Rényi (attribution)

She said, "That was a very curious coincidence, the Hotel d'Arpajon, was it not?"

"Prodigious," said Stephen. "And yet in a way one might say that the whole of life is a tissue of prodigious coincidences: as for example that at the very moment we attempt to cross the road this particular coach and six should come by; yet though extremely unlikely, it is a fact. And the glabrous face within belongs to Monsieur de Talleyrand-Périgord." Stephen took off his hat: the glabrous face returned his bow. "It is a most improbable coincidence that as we enter La Mothe's courtyard, and it is just here, on the right - take care of the excrement, Villiers - some merchant should walk into his counting-house in Stockholm, or that Jack Aubrey should mount his horse to pursue the fox. Though now I come to think of it, Jack would scarcely pursue the innocent fox at this time of the year: yet the principle remains. You may object that the overwhelming majority of these coincidences are undetected, which is eminently true; but they are there for all that, and as I raise this knocker, some man in China breathes his last.".
Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

51. When the mayor's press conference was over, I screamed. And my scream was immediately answered by thunder and lightning. My friend Aaron e-mailed me and said, "Can you believe it's fucking RAINING right now?" Distraught, wanting and needing my family's attention, I drove home. As I walked up the front steps, as I began to cry, as I touched the doorknob, it thundered so loudly that car alarms went off. Then, as I stepped into the house, closed the door behind me, and fell onto the floor and loudly wept, the wind blew open our back door. That's the power of grief.

52. I don't believe in magic. But I do believe in interpreting coincidence exactly the way you want to.

53. Do you know why Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.
Sherman Alexie, Sixty-One Things I Learned During the Sonics Trial, The Stranger.

By providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueller: it brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything. I suppose all things human have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognised, acknowledged, utilised, and in others is veiled. The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Nobody who has not written comic strips can really understand the phrase, economy of words. It's like trying to write Paradise Lost in haiku.
Peter Dickinson, talk given to the Exeter Conference on Children's Literature, 1970, expanded in A Defence of Rubbish

Below painting comes illustration... below that comes cartoons... then, below the gutter, are the sewers - strip cartoons! Comics! Ugh! The very cesspits of non-culture.
Raymond Briggs, widely quoted, provenance not given

One of the joys of doing comics is the informal manner in which you do them. It's Alan and a keyboard, me and a piece of paper and that's basically it. And because it's very low-budget, there's no great investment by anybody in it. It's a thing which is very personal and very pleasurable to do. In a sense, it's words and images going directly from our minds to the reader. I think that's what we've always both really liked about comics.
Dave Gibbons, interview on WatchmenComicMovie.com

When suddenly facing the realities of 22 pages a month, chunks of plot get thrown out of the window like fridges.
Neil Gaiman interviewed on Radio 2 by Jonathan Ross, 15.11.2003

I've compared the experience of writing comics scripts to that of being an architect who draws up a plan and later walks around the building, taking pleasure in the way the shadows fall, the rightness of a fountain or a window. You explain what you want, and then, if you're capable of explaining what you want, panel by panel, you get something back that's better than you had imagined.
Neil Gaiman Locus magazine July 2003

In 1989, I was at a Christmas party for some magazine that was at the Groucho Club [...] I got talking to somebody who, if memory serves, was literary editor at the Telegraph. They asked what I did, and I said I wrote comics. The gentleman looked as though I’d slapped him with a herring, but he couldn't just stop talking to me and turn away, so he asked: 'Oh well, what kind of comics?' I said I'd written a thing called Violent Cases and that I was writing a thing called The Sandman. He said: 'Hang on, you're Neil Gaiman?!' I said: 'Yes.' He said: 'Oh my dear fellow, you don't write comics, you write graphic novels!' I felt like a hooker who'd just been called 'a lady of the evening'.
Neil Gaiman The Guardian 30.07.2022

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Sir Barnett Cocks (1907 - 1989), Clerk of the House of Commons

I am not a communist because communism concentrates and absorbs all the powers of society into the state; because it necessarily ends in the centralisation of property in the hands of the state, while I want the abolition of the state - the radical extirpation of the principle of authority and the tutelage of the state, which, on the pretext of making men moral and civilised, has up to now enslaved, oppressed, exploited and depraved them.
Mikhail Bakunin

I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers - studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.
Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

And Mrs Thatcher has conjugated the verb "to leak":

• I bring matters into the public domain
• You leak
• He betrays a colleague

The awakened conscience of an individual will often lead him to do things in haste that he had better have left undone, but the conscience of a nation awakened by a respectable old gentleman who has an unseen power up his sleeve will pave hell with a vengeance.
Samuel Butler Erewhon

Il faut conserver le plus possible, réparer le moins possible, ne restaurer à aucun prix.
Didron, quoted by Joseph Bédier

...This was 'clear soup', Kamante's exquisite consommé. Perhaps the making of this soup taught Karen Blixen something about telling stories. The recipe calls for you to keep the spirit but discard the substance of your rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones, root vegetables and red meat. You then submit them, like a storyteller, to 'fire and patience'. And the clarity comes at the end, a magic trick.
Judith Thurman Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen

If only the amateurs would get it into their heads that novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving, until one finds a few discarded valuables.
Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dustbin haphazard and emptying it out again in another place.
Evelyn Waugh, quoted in The Guardian 25.10.2003

...Albert's habit of lecturing industry and the arts at public dinners, the only form of intellectual exercise available to the consorts of queens.
John Prebble The Highland Clearances

We pointed out that every author in the world knows what 'consultation' means: it means the publishers saying: 'This is the cover of your new book', and our saying: 'Well, it's horrible', and their replying: 'Well, tough.' 'Full' consultation, I suppose, would mean that plus lunch.
Philip Pullman, in email to supporters of the No to Age Banding Campaign, quoted in The Times Online

Tant y a que je me contredits bien à l'aventure, mais la vérité, comme disoit Demades, je ne la contredy point.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 2: Du Repentir

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. - "Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

On Cooking the First Hero in Spring.
Title of a short story by Ian Watson

Innocent cylinder with a wound,
you have kept the grape's rich blood
from the disillusioning breath of day
at your own cost. Freckled and branded
you lie here on the table,
one end pale magenta. Far from your tree
you became pleasure's sacrifice.

"According to Chaffinch," she said, with the Mythology open on her lap at the picture of the Summer Lady, "the god Blind Io created the Cornucopia from a horn of the magical goat Almeg to feed his two children by the Goddess Bisonomy, who was later turned into a shower of oysters by Epidity, god of things shaped like potatoes, after insulting Resonata, goddess of weasels, by throwing a mole at her shadow. It is now the badge of office of the Summer Goddess."
Terry Pratchett, Winterthing

The true cost of something is what you give up to get it.
Definition of 'Opportunity Cost' in Economist
Based on Matthew Bishop, Essential Economics

A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions.
Subtitle of English Tolstoyan magazine The Crank

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

...I saw two of them. As my vision is not ironic, but romantic, they were small figures, remote, in a tremendous waste landscape of ice and snow. They were pulling a sledge or something over the ice, hauling together. That is all I saw. I didn't know who they were. I didn't even know what sex they were (I must say I was surprised when I found out).
Ursula LeGuin, Science Fiction and Mrs Brown

Irving always said credit is great when it's given to you, not when you take it.
Attributed to Irving Thalberg by Arthur Freed in Lilian Ross Picture

I knew it would be a good film, a special film, when I started shooting. It's like when you play cricket and it's one of those days when you're on form and every ball pitched to you comes right in the centre of the bat and every ball you hit goes for a six. It's either a four or a six, that's what I told my wife, but I think the ball has gone out of the stadium. I can't find the ball.
Anil Kapoor on Slumdog Millionaire, in The Guardian, 19.02.2009

You are charged with arson, kidnapping, theft, grievous wounding, possession of unlawful atomic weapons, taking and driving away, conspiracy to overthrow the government, coveting thy neighbour's ox, graverobbing, shoplifting, 714 separate driving offences, forging sacred relics, transmuting base metal into gold, genocide, spitting and thirty two offences so unusual and horrible that they do not have names.
Alan Moore, D.R. & Quinch Go Straight

It is an offence to sing on a bus.
P.C. Smart, Sunderland Magistrates' Court

What this is is a kind of colonialism. You, Erró, have found a place for yourself in the land of the Fine Art Elite, in "Gallery-land", and you have gone out and discovered a dark continent inhabited by pygmies - barely more than savages really - people with a colourful but primitive culture. Like the Victorian explorers you find what they do ghastly but somehow alluring so you steal from them, give them nothing in return and dismiss them. You display bits of their infantile and garish nonsense in what you call a "synthesis" on a gallery wall in the civilised world, something which has nothing whatsoever to do with giving a full and accurate "report" on the stuff you steal or the people you steal it from. It's more to do with the titillation of your peers. You'd like them to be shocked by the vulgarity of the artefacts you're bringing back from whatever nasty place you've been to but appreciate them (and you, of course) in that post-modern kind of way. One reviewer of your work said "I don't know where Erró finds all that stuff". Luckily for you she and other inhabitants of the galleries don't know the names of the people you steal from and you're not in a hurry to list them. You're exploiting people like me, not because you're a "witness to our time" but because you want to turn the base metal of comics into art gold - and you'd like to have a lucrative career in Gallery-land.
Brian Bolland to an artist who had "sampled" his work (via)

You had to come as a god or goddess, either in an actual theology or one of your own devising. Thus, when I asked a woman covered in little tea strainers who she was, she replied 'Cutleria! Goddess of the forgotten bits of the cutlery drawer!' Wow, I said, I've been following your path for years and my mother has been a devotee of you since 1934. She replied that many invoke her name with traditional mantras ('Oh fuck it! Forget it! We'll do without the lemon squeezer.')
Liz Williams, LiveJournal

And of course, humanity being what it is, few things are more conducive of cynicism than to observe stage by stage the evolution of any revolutionary movement.
Fitzroy Maclean, Back to Bokhara

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
Frank Zappa