British Broadcaster Quotes

David Attenborough

Kenneth Clark

Nigella Lawson

Melvyn Bragg

George Galloway

Alistair Cooke

Jim Al-Khalili

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Humphrey Carpenter

I believe in reincarnation, so I've left all my money to myself.

Claiming to have explained monetarism to Margaret Thatcher:

It makes one feel like the geography teacher who showed a map of the world to Genghis Khan.

All the girls say they love me
all their mums say I'm lovely —
ever since I lived in the clouds.

The game minus slow bowling is like bread without butter or, even worse, French cuisine without the sauces.

It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

He used to be fairly indecisive, but now he's not so certain.

I'm proud to say I've made a career out of being trivial. I think it's an art form.

Janet Street-Porter

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: "However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you."

On his knowledge of popular music:

I'm blessed with total recall, except about where I left my umbrella.

He smiled rather too much. He smiled at breakfast, you know.

Charles Wheeler (journalist)

English took time to emerge as the common tongue. There had been luck, but also cunning and the beginnings of what was to become English's most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity to absorb others.

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional live audience quickly conspire to create a perfect storm of perpetual bickering.

Charlie Brooker

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

I cannot help being happy. I've struggled against it but to no good. Apart from an odd five minutes here and there, I have been happy all my life. There is, I am well aware, no virtue whatever in this. It results from a combination of heredity, health, good fortune, and shallow intellect.

Arthur Marshall

If what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows…Upon this new Britain the Review bestows a name in the hope that it will stick—subtopia.

I shall mention in passing just one example of a gift from the Arabs that I for one am rather grateful for: coffee — especially as it was originally banned in Europe as a 'Muslim drink.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.

I don't believe in coincidences. I believe that if you're doing the right thing, you are handed back pieces of yourself. It's like something goes right for you and this will keep you going for six weeks, and then your next test is going to be designed for you.

Food can comfort. But when you've just lost someone you love you don't want that to be the case. When my mother died some people came up to me and said, "You'll get over it." That felt like such an assault to me.

If God had meant us to go metric, why did he give Christ twelve apostles?

Gyles Brandreth

I suppose we all tend to remember only the happiness from our childhood, as a sundial refuses to tell the time except in fine weather.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

Alastair Campbell

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities, hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take on life.