Quotes by British Authors - Page 134

I think it's wrong that only one percent of the people should own ninety percent of the country.
Sally Wentworth
You rich people are all the same. You couldn't care less about the other half of the world. They can all starve to death for all you care!
Sally Wentworth
Veal! Trust these bloated plutocrats to eat the flesh of poor, newly-born calves!
Sally Wentworth
It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
G.K. Chesterton
They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.
Richard Adams
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery..
Winston S. Churchill
If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
George Orwell
...Come home, Bod.' ‘I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.
Neil Gaiman
Stop fretting and eat your Madeira Cake..
Diane Samuels
If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” Liza tells Bod.
Neil Gaiman
It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.
Deborah Meyler
That dot is special. That dot is where LIFE lives. And I get it, it's biased of a living organism (like me) to think that life is important and special, but I don't care!Because stars don't care, galaxies don't care, but people do. Undoubtedly we're something special because, as far as we can tell, we are unique.
Charlie McDonnell
My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.-Gandalf to Eomer, of Eowyn
J.R.R. Tolkien
Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.
Damien Hirst
Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.
P.G. Wodehouse
Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about “shit”. It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades.
Dean Cavanagh
Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
Roma Tearne
He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
Johnny Rich
Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called "artist's world.
Muse
There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.
Guy Mankowski
. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.
Virginia Woolf
How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?
Hanif Kureishi
Such meeting reveal that which we all darkly suspect about those whose art we have loved: that they are unlikely to be whatever it is we imagine them to be.
Morrissey
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
E.H. Gombrich
Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.
Andrew Miller
Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.
Glenn Haybittle
A lot of excellent illustrators are working at the moment--especially in fantasy and children's books. It is exciting also to see graphic artists such as Dave McKean, in his film Mirrormask, moving between different media. I also greatly admire the more traditional work of Gennady Spirin and Roberto Innocenti. Kinuko Craft, John Jude Palencar, John Howe, Charles Vess, Brian Froud ... I'll stop there, as the list would get too long. But--in a fit of pride and justified nepotism--I'll add my daughter, Virginia Lee, to the list. Her first illustrated children's book, The Frog Bride [coming out in the U.K. in September, 2007], will be lovely.
Alan Lee
... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.
Pauline Gedge
The Four Keys of Great Managers:1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination."2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps."3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses."4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.
Marcus Buckingham
Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.
Marcus Buckingham
Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.
Marcus Buckingham
In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.
Marcus Buckingham
Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much.Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.
Marcus Buckingham
Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.
Marcus Buckingham
The measures themselves are easily distorted to suit reporting purposes.
John Seddon
This fits in with what I saw in staff in astronomical facilities and was reporting to the management team: 10-14% Oxygen: Emotional upset, abnormal fatigue, disturbed respiration.
Steven Magee
Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.
Marcus Buckingham
...every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.
Marcus Buckingham
Employers are like horses — they require management.
P.G. Wodehouse
In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.
Gerald Durrell
In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.
Marcus Buckingham
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
Max Beerbohm
A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person - this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest?
Joseph Conrad
The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.
Graham Joyce
Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.
Jenny Diski
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
Winston S. Churchill
...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.
Ned Beauman
For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!
Agatha Christie
I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper’s come and shaken me up, and there are snowflakes all over the place, whirling around until I don’t know what I think anymore. And bits of glitter, too. Tiny bits of shiny, secret excitement.
Sophie Kinsella
GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…
Tom Stoppard
I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
Salman Rushdie
The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.
C.S. Forester
You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle.
Terry Pratchett
Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.
John le Carré
A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island.
Sarah Hall
Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession
Sarah Hall
There ́s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul with strong Turkish roots. But the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures.
Elif Shafak
In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.
Claire Fuller
Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. "Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination".
Terry Pratchett
Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.
Matthew De Abaitua