Jonathan Meades Famous Quotes
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At any point in the world's history most architecture is going to be bad but I think there's been a collective mentality since the late Conservative years - the end of Thatcher/start of Major and certainly continued throughout New Labour and continuing now - that new is necessarily better, so there is this neophilia which isn't the vanguard of progress, it's just the vanguard of the construction industry enjoying itself.
While I'm sure people in Britain have money worries, they don't have them like the French do. The French, however much money they have, are worried. They're a very stressed people. It seems to be a very essential component of the national psyche.
I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.
I don't believe in synergy. I believe that things have to be specific to the medium that they're in.
I don't think things necessarily should have a meaning. If stuff has a meaning then why do [writing] about it? If you're trying to say, 'Tall buildings are great' why not just leave it at that: "Tall buildings are great."
I think the only remotely interesting drug was acid. I had a slightly peculiar attitude towards it I think. Just about everything about hippydom I hated.
I do make myself be interested in places in a way that I don't make myself be interested in people.
When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.
Going on things like rollercoasters is not really up my street I guess. I don't feel like I need to do stunts. I'm too scared and I don't think it's my job.
The only bright feature of cultural relativism's triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown.
The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival is an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use of which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It's the sort of stuff to make me wince- a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It's no taste which is so disheartening.
I think television is a medium which has the potential to do great things but has been traduced by these ... terrible people who rise through the ranks.
If you have slightly pathological interest in all the components of places, it forces you to engage with them in a way that perhaps otherwise you wouldn't, and that's the only way I can put it.
I like extremely effeminate dogs like terriers or schnauzers. I make an exception for giant schnauzers and big poodles. Basically, I like dogs which can be dyed day-glo colours.
I wasn't a keen taker of speed because I didn't like the comedown from it.
You always have to find something to say about the subject and in seven cases out of ten there is nothing to say.
The construction industry likes nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they can impose a brand new building, because that way they can make more money.
I'm a very, very unreckless person. I mean, I look left, I look right, I look left, I look right, then I repeat the process and then I decide not to cross the road at the last minute.
Brummies run themselves down, they're very self-deprecating. Whereas Yorkshire people certainly aren't.
Vertigo doesn't apply in planes for some reason. You think it's some kind of magic and you don't know how it's keeping you up, but when you're on a cliff top it's a different matter.
I don't see any point in having a public service broadcaster which attempts to compete with the commercial sector. Obviously part of its remit is to entertain, but entertainment doesn't necessarily mean scraping the bottom of the barrel and appealing to the very lowest common denominator.
In creating a building, architects do think they're making the world a better place. And then they hope to make the world an even better place by making another thing which will be even bigger than the last thing ... and it is part of the pathology of being an architect to believe thus, and they do believe it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey.
I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd ... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.
I genuinely find it difficult to think of places that I'd never want to see again. It might be because part of my career has been concerned with writing about topography.
I like looking at the countryside as well as anyone ... a little countryside goes a long way, but it's almost like the DNA of a civilisation is in its cities.
When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.
I think the French agonise more about being French, I don't think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don't really care. But the French think about it all the time, it's an absolute preoccupation.
Conversion requires a subtler mind. Architects don't like it, architects want to create their own landmark buildings so that people a few years hence will say, 'Oh, that building there is being knocked down, who did that one?'