British Screenwriter Quotes

Roald Dahl

James Hilton

Terence Rattigan

Alan Sillitoe

William Boyd (writer)

Tracey Ullman

Russell T Davies

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

Brian Moore (novelist)

I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food, which they take for granted - but his or her entertainment value.

Geoffrey Household

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

William Boyd (writer)

Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas!

And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth!

Cecil Arthur Lewis

To lose a lover or even a husband or two during the course of one's life can be vexing. But to lose one's teeth is a catastrophe.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

Christopher Hampton

The United States is different because I've spent a lot of time there since, and so there's more of a continuum. It's definitely the U.S. that has the deepest roots in my soul. I spent my childhood believing I was English, and would one day be going home. But when we came back to live here, I started to realise how much of me was bedded somewhere else. Whenever I walk out of an airport in the U.S. and smell the air, a bit of me feels it's coming home.

Michael Marshall Smith

On how to make a toast for breakfast:

Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown's the savory and white's the treat.

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

Ben Aaronovitch

Effie M. was a monster. Six foot high and as strong as a farm horse.No sooner had she decided that she wanted UncleTom than she knocked him off his bicycle and told him.

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.

Russell T Davies

As time passes we all get better at blazing a trail through the thicket of advice.

Claire: How do you know you're…God?
Earl Of Gurney: Simple. When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

David Nicholls (writer)

People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?

Caryl Churchill

I have come to believe that the best kind of walk, or journey, is the one in which you have no particular destination when you set out.

Referring the matter to a committee' can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions.

Don't listen to the politicians, always look at the artists, they're the first to tell us where we're going.

Mark Mills (writer)

For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that [beauty] is nothing more than an accident.

Charlie Fletcher

Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don't know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.