Craig Brown Quotes
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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.
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A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.
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Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.
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When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.
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Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws.
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Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
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The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling.
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Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
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As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.
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All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
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Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.
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When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.
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Cleanliness is the scourge of art.
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People think of waves as going in an orderly crash - whoosh - crash - whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time.
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Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued.
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For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.
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Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.
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In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.
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My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.
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Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.
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There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.
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The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
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When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.
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Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.