Michael Frayn Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

Well, the stories come in different ways. I can't remember exactly where most of them came from, I can only remember them growing in my head.

Michael Frayn
For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

Michael Frayn
When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

Michael Frayn
You can create a good impression on yourself by being right... but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

Michael Frayn
A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child's hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult's hand and imagination to grasp.

Michael Frayn
No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.

Michael Frayn
The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation. Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed. Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.

Michael Frayn
We look at the taciturn, inscrutable universe, and cry, "Speak to me!"

Michael Frayn
It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

Michael Frayn
Like anyone who is interested in science I was always interested in quantum mechanics, because it has so many bizarre philosophical implications. I have also been interested in what kind of knowledge you can have of people's intentions. It just seemed to me that there is a kind of parallel between physical uncertainty and people's intentions.

Michael Frayn
Farce has always been regarded in this country, in fact everywhere, as rather down-market, popular entertainment.

Michael Frayn
I once talked to a judge who said that he spent his life in court being skeptical of witnesses who couldn't give an account of incidents they claimed they had seen. Then one day he was in the street and an accident happened right in front of his eyes. He had a full view of everything that occurred, and afterwards he could not give any account of what he had seen. Good reporters feel the same sort of difficulties. Like scientists they have to slowly change their expectations of the world, and take into account the discrepancies between what they see and what they are expecting to see.

Michael Frayn
Einstein famously said that "the theory determines the observation." He meant that in an experiment what you tend to observe is what either confirms or disconfirms the theory you started with. Sometimes scientists do manage to notice what appears to be extraneous phenomena, and look for a new explanation. They then hit on new theories, which have to be tested in their turn by experiment.

Michael Frayn
I learned French at school and Russian in the army. I switched to philosophy because the language course consisted of a lot of academic work and a certain amount of literature.

Michael Frayn
It's not excellence which leads to celebrity, but celebrity which leads to excellence. One makes one's reputation, and one's reputation enables one to achieve the conditions in which one can do good work.

Michael Frayn
It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope.

Michael Frayn
You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success, then that's your bad luck.

Michael Frayn
To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.

Michael Frayn
One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."

Michael Frayn
We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.

Michael Frayn
If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

Michael Frayn
Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.

Michael Frayn
That's what it's all about. Doors and sardines. Getting on – getting off. Getting the sardines on – getting the sardines off. That's farce. That's the theatre. That's life.

Michael Frayn
Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

Michael Frayn
I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

Michael Frayn