Michael Frayn Quotes

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

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

No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here ... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am.

Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them.

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.

..deceivers must expect to be deceived.

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.

But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.

Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

I can't help feeling," says Howard, sticking his head forward ruefully, "now I know who you are, that I've been a bit outspoken in some of my remarks about the system."

"Not at all!" says Freddie.

"Not a bit!" says Caroline.

"But I must in all honesty say," says Howard very quickly, jutting his chin out and smilingly blinking his eyes, "that I still think there are a number of things in the universe which really need seriously looking into."

"Oh, the whole thing!" says Freddie with feeling.

"Ghastly mess," says Caroline.

"Absolute disaster area," says Freddie.

"Frightful," says Caroline.

"So far as one can understand it," says Freddie.

"Freddie feels frightfully strongly about it, you see," says Caroline.

Howard looks from one to the other in astonishment.

"Good heavens!" he says. "I should never have guessed...."

"Oh, Freddie's a terrific radical," says Caroline.

"Really?" says Howard.

"A terrible firebrand, really," says Caroline.

Freddie knots himself up.

"A bit firebrandish," he admits.

"A bit of a Maoist, to tell you the truth," says Caroline.

She looks sideways at Howard to see how he is taking this. So does Freddie.

"A Maoist?" says Howard, astonished.

"Permanent revolution," says Caroline.

"That style of thing," agrees Freddie.

"W

Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life's over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we're gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children's children.

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

Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.

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

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.

He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.

Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums

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

Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?

Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities ...
Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.

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.

And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes. It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

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.

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

We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'.

If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.

Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not.

For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him.

Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door ...

I've never written a fiction before about real people ... I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.

The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassing familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything before me - all of the frightening, half-understood promises of life.

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.