Craig Brown Quotes

Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws.

Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.

People think of waves as going in an orderly crash - whoosh - crash - whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time.

Men know something that women don't know. Never ask directions of a stranger.

Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.

When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.

Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.

Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.

It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.

In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.

One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.

Without anything being said, there were no women at our lunches. Not that we were talking pussy. Or not much. But it was a chaps thing. Seasoned observers all, we set the world, such as it was, to rights, offsetting our intellectual know-how with truly wondrous flights of fancy. It was at the time of the ruinous yet avoidable civil war in Angola, in which far too many people died, or, in our immortal parlance, became 'deadified.' It might have been anyone - actually, I [Christopher Hitchens] am sure it was our poet friend Craig Raine - who came up with the appalling yet unforgettable idea that there is a design flaw in the female form, and that the breasts and the buttocks really ought to be on the same side. For myself, I have oft been perplexed as to why our heads are where, in a truly just world, our penises really ought to be, and my arse is not located between my chin and my nose, allowing me mellifluously to talk out of it.

Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.

Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.

When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.

You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.

By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.

Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.

For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.

As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.

As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.

Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.

I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.

The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.

The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.

My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.

Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.

Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how.

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.

Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.

There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he 'always had something of ... rivetting stupidity to say on any subject'.

When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.

It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.

Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.

Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.

One evening, at the time of the Six-Day War, I [Christopher Hitchens] had my wicked way with a lovely lady, who had earlier intimated that she did not perhaps find me entirely repulsive. We procured a decent room, as I remember, at the Cadogan Hotel. Perhaps a little flown with wine, I asked her to don a Martin Amis face mask which I had - with a combination of sticky tape, elastic bands, cardboard, and a much-treasured photograph - prepared earlier. The fair damsel was happy to oblige, and thus attired she permitted me to embark on the hugely agreeable pathway to libidinous fulfillment.

The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling.

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.

Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.