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It's worth turning up to an awards gig if you know you've won one but, since you never do know, it's not worth it.
Arthur Smith -
The history of the relationship between comedy and swimming is short indeed. Of course it is always funny when someone falls into water, but that's about it.
Arthur Smith
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When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.
Arthur Smith -
I abhor nothing more than bumping into someone I know on the Tube.
Arthur Smith -
My eyebrows could do with a trim.
Arthur Smith -
Give me the new thing and give it to me now. I don't want that old thing - I've seen it, heard it, bought it, slept with it, loved it, but now I'm bored with the old thing and I'm gagging for the new stuff.
Arthur Smith -
My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.
Arthur Smith -
The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.
Arthur Smith
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Acting is the most demanding, painful job in the world.
Arthur Smith -
The outfits come and go but there is a constant that I like about the catwalk model: the snotty expression.
Arthur Smith -
Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'
Arthur Smith -
It was Julie Burchill who decreed that, beyond a certain age, a man should not be seen in a leather jacket.
Arthur Smith -
If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.
Arthur Smith -
Because comedy is cheap to put on: if you've got a play or an opera, there's a whole load of people and a set, but comedy is just one man or woman. And because TV has learned to love comics - there's so many more around now than when I started out.
Arthur Smith
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Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
Arthur Smith -
Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.
Arthur Smith -
When they meet a stand-up comic, people sometimes remark: 'That must be the hardest job in the world.' Among comedians, only Freddie Starr is not embarrassed and slightly appalled by this remark.
Arthur Smith -
It is London fashion week, and once again I haven't been invited to any shows. This is upsetting given my well-known love of fashion, or, as I think of it, playing with the dressing-up box.
Arthur Smith -
Every generation of children has its private hero.
Arthur Smith -
Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.
Arthur Smith
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Theatricals can be irritating, but will provide a better night out than mobile phone salespeople.
Arthur Smith -
The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.
Arthur Smith -
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of 'Peter Pan' for the school play. They didn't use it - I imagine it was unperformable - but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
Arthur Smith -
I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.
Arthur Smith