British Screenwriter Quotes

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.

Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she "does know what she likes". Let us call her Aunt Edna.

Terence Rattigan

Nobody ever notices the host at a party, until the drink runs out.

Anthony Gilbert (author)

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

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.

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

We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn't hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

William Nicholson

He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.

Twenty years ago when we had no respect for women they just used to say, 'You're chucked.' And now we do respect them we have to lie to them sensitively.

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.

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

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)

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

Even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice.
That was the beauty of the written word. It was invariably taken at face value and granted permit to be spoken as the truth. It lived longer than the man.
And wreaked havoc in the process.

That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.

I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.

You will have Time, that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

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

Ben Aaronovitch

On how to make a toast for breakfast:

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

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

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

And one's passions are so random and unreliable - cricket scores one minute, Swinburne the next.

Julian Mitchell

Boston is one of the few American cities that regrets the past... Boston's like England. Up to its ears in yellowing photographs.

Penelope Gilliatt

The 50s face was angry, the 60s face was well-fed, the 70s face was foxy. Perhaps it was the right expression: there was a lot to be wary about.

Keith Waterhouse