Craig Brown Quotes
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Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
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Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.
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When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.
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Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
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Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.
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Personally, I belong to the speedy school of golf. If it were left up to me, I would introduce a new rule that said every golf ball has to stay in motion from the moment it leaves the tee to the moment it plops into the hole, thus obliging each player to run along after his ball and give it another whack before it stops rolling.
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Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how.
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The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.
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Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
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Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.
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Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.
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By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.
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What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.
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There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
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How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'
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More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
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It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.
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Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
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One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
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Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.
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Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.
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It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.
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In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
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Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.