Lgbt People

"Graham was getting through two bottles of gin a day, but those were the large ones that you get behind a bar. Pretty colossal. … He never used the word alcoholic, but he knew darned well that he had to clean his act up. As I understand it anyway, Graham already knew he would be playing Brian [in Life of Brian], and had to really stop drinking with that in mind."

"There was one occasion when John Cleese and myself actually felt guilty about laughing at something we were writing, because it was in incredibly bad taste. So bad was the taste that we just couldn't help laughing at it. It concerned a gentleman walking into … an undertaker's premises with his dead mother in a sack. And from there it got worse."

"[My parents] came to grips with the drinking … much more easily, I think, than [with my sexuality]. Yes. But, things are rather better now than in those days, of course. It was some time ago. And now, even the Church of England, I think, regards a homosexual as merely being handicapped."

"It's fear. … There's no point in it. We should just love each other, and do it in our own way. That's the only thing that's important."

"The very first day of filming of The Holy Grail, in fact, we were halfway up a mountainside in Glen Coe, and I hadn't gotten my daily dose, and it was seven o'clock in the morning that we left the hotel. The bar wasn't open; I hadn't realised this, and hadn't gotten anything prepared the night before that I should have if I'd researched my drinking properly. And so I had DTs on the mountainside while having to try and remember lines and (uh) stand up. … It was then that I decided next time that I do a job like this I'm going to be clean for it. It's not fair to the other chaps in the group, it's not fair to me, it's not fair to what I've written, and it's very stupid."

"I think … [what attracted me to show business] was the early radio shows. I was an avid listener to radio shows like Take It from Here; before that, Jewel and Warriss, Hancock, all sorts of radio shows. And then, later—when I was around thirteen, fourteen—The Goon Show, of course. Here came a show which was not like any of the other shows. It didn't have the same kind of rules. It didn't have any rules. It didn't even like the medium that was putting it out, particularly; it didn't like the BBC. Wonderful! There was something I could relate to, and did."

"Once the decision had been made, once I decided to stop [drinking], it was easy—except for the … three days of unpleasantness, of—well, of having things crawl all over me and hallucinating. … One of the worst things was not being able to remember if I'd slept or not, whether I was dreaming, or whether I was awake. I didn't know."

"The entire machinery of academic promotion and academic endorsement and of academic advancement has been taken over, and therefore heretics like me have to be routed out. It's very similar to what happened to German universities under Hitler. The group that is most vulnerable, I'm afraid, are intellectuals. Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders. These people wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue. We've been here before. This is Robespierre."

"I've always had a naughty streak. I've always challenged authority. I'm on the right but it's kind of ironic on the right. I've studied kings, so I’m very aware of the feet of clay of authority."

"In the name of acceptance, of broadening, of anti-discrimination, we're at the risk of undoing what is our only claim to survive in the future. The only thing that's made these little islands what they are is this astonishing burst of creativity of the last 500 years. It is our individualism, it's our bloody mindedness, our awkwardness, our refusal to fit into categories that has made us, dare I use the word, great. And if we lose that we are lost, we have absolutely nothing else. The world that my enemies are trying to create is one that we will just go down the tubes, we are finished. I believe in going down fighting."

"What are the points of comparison? Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it’s either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union. You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews."

"[Advocating for 'leave' in the then forthcoming EU membership referendum] We have a very large trade deficit with Europe, we have a decent trade balance with the rest of the world. Is Europe going to cut off its nose to spite its face? It seems to me so infinitely unlikely. There's no risk. There would be a risk if we were running a German-style trade surplus with Europe. But we're not. The problem of our leaving Europe is a problem for the Germans and not us."

"You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil. And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged male supporters to expose their knees."

"[The English, particularly some on the left, are] incapable of recognising that this is national socialism. And the nationalism is much more important than the socialism, as it was in Germany. The socialism is a very fragile, superficial thing. The nationalism is very real."

"There’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation – they are all products of it. We are all products of it [...] The honest teaching of the British empire is to say it was the first key stage of world globalisation. It was probably the most important moment in human history and it is still with us. As for the idea that slavery is this terrible disease that dare not speak its name. It only dare not speak its name because we settled it 200 years ago. Do you know what, we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much the exact same time we got rid of slavery – in the 1830s - we don’t go on about that."

"[Responding to a suggestion Prime minister Rishi Sunak appeared to be "detached, or at least semi-detached, from this coronation" from journalist Andrew Pierce] Invisible. I think one of the reasons that I think a lot has gone wrong, for example, why parliament has not been properly represented at the coronation of a parliamentary monarchy, is because the government isn't interested in the constitution. The prime minister, the man of immense talent, of extraordinary skill, but really, not fully grounded in our culture [...] I know that's a difficult and controversial thing to say, but I think it's true. And, again, this coronation is going to highlight far too much our differences rather than what unites us."

"Slavery was not genocide otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived."

"Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be. They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition. The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this. The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust."

"[On what she thinks is most special and unique about Eurovision]: Well, it's because we don't have that many communities where everybody is accepted, regardless of your sexuality, religious background, or color. As long as you come in with love and respect for one another, you're welcome."

"The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery."

""By their fruits you shall know them." I always thought Jesus was a rotten theologian, but he is jolly good at politics."

"Freedom of speech wasn’t won by being nice, it has been won by struggle with religion."

"The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."

"If you think about it, Alex Salmond is a democratic Caledonian Hitler, although some would say Hitler was more democratically elected."

"[The governments "British values" should include] queuing, drunkenness, nostalgia, loving pets, self-loathing, wit and eccentricity."

"We're at great risk of dying of niceness [...] I hate niceness."

"English national identity is too important to be left to the loons of the BNP and the EDL [English Defence League]."

"[On Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech] His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong. [Referring to another participant in the discussion, Owen Jones, author of Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes] What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."

"In fact, they go so far as to differentiate their status between inner scholarii – who have been inducted into the mysteries as Elton's own students – and discipuli, an outer and less privileged band who have only sat at his feet, without the benefit of formal instruction. Long ago, in my own very happy days in Elton's seminar, we used to divide the group into Eltonians and Eltonettes. These were roughly to be equated with 'us' and 'them', English and Americans. Eltonians, we thought, grasped the essence of what Elton was trying to do without needing to imitate the style; Eltonettes reproduced the form to the last perfection of pedantry, but caught nothing of the substance. There is too much in this volume that confirms our arrogance."

"[Shakespeare's date of birth (23 April) as a potential English national day] If we decide to go down this route of an English national day, it will mean we have become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish [...] We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots and the Welsh are typical small nations with a romantic 19th-century-style nationalism."

"No, Colonel, I don't know any such cattle, and if I did I would, as your friend, sooner give you a dose of quick poison than take you into such danger."

"He told me much about himself in a very brief space, for he seemed to have more tongues than ears. I could not get a word in anywhere and you know I am too much in love with my own voice to like being suppressed and overtalked in that way, but enough of Dr. Tomblety. he seemed a good fellow after all."

"He then broke into a homily on the sin and folly of dissipation, fiercely denounced all women and especially fallen women."

"Guilt is real, it is serious, but when it becomes also a fashion, there is corruption."

"We are not only what we are today but what we were yesterday and if you burn your immediate past there is nothing left but ashes which are all very well for those heads that like nothing better than to be sprinkled with ashes. But are these ash-covered heads really the spokesmen of our conscience?"

"It takes a true writer to show us what has been missing in our lives. No one can give the writer an assignment that his own impulse has not bespoken but more than his security should inform him. "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's.""

"Roving was good for the writer; to have been a reporter undoubtedly informed Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane. To know far more than he may ever use is imperative for the writer."

"Every period takes stock of the one preceding it and the past that was good enough for the fathers never seems good enough for the children no matter how idyllic it may seem to the great-grandchildren."

"Writing should be dangerous: as dangerous as Socrates. There should be no refuge for the writer either in the Ivory Tower or the Social Church."

"[On her home life, she married her female partner in 2022] the rampant feminist that she is, cannot wait to have a housewife."

"I've genuinely never worried about a career. [...] I can see how politicians game play – it's a long game of chess for many of them. For me, it's either right or wrong, sensible or stupid."

"The great authors to come up since the Second World War have mostly been dead a long time. Kafka, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James should be with us always but their resurgence in the forties presaged more than recognition of their stature. It signified also a genteel retreat from a period too complicated to confront easily. The writings of the detached past became a kind of smokescreen to conceal the present dilemma, and the ruins. But a ruin can be as good a point of departure as any. There is usually new life in the ruins as anyone who ever saw a population react from a bombing can testify. But the picker-uppers are not trying to salvage tender mementos only. They usually are looking for bricks and firewood."

"Literary epochs come and go but this wave seems to have frozen in the cold war."

"There is no such thing as a writer untouched by his time. Even the most inner experience is a response to some outside."

"I'm a woman, I'm a lesbian, nobody's cancelling me and I want trans people to be able to live with dignity and happiness and for newspapers and politicians to leave them the hell alone."

"Being trans is not something to be feared. It’s just an aspect of a human being, the same way being gay is just an aspect of who I am. [...] The only place as far as I’m concerned that my sex matters, as opposed to my gender, is in a medical setting. That's between me and a doctor."

"If you are a human being, you are not an intellectual debate and nor should you be made to be one."

"Once upon a time intellectuals made great prolific statements about race, saying "I think you'll find the statistics show more BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people, crime goes up". They might have been an intellectual, but they were also a racist. The vast majority of people don’t know a lot about the trans community, and why should they? They are less than one per cent of the population."

"The Deputy Prime Minister, I thank him for his kind words and we did join this place at the same time and I'm pretty sure we'll be leaving at the same time."

"We have the lowest pensions in Europe, the lowest sick pay, we pretend the minimum wage is a living wage when it’s not. We miss our own economic targets time and time again. We’re happy to break international law. We are turning into a country where words hold no value and over the last 12 years I fear we are sleepwalking closer and closer to the f-word and I know everyone is scared to say it for fear of sounding over the top or being accused of going too far. But I say this with all sincerity, when I say the f-word, I’m talking about facism. Fascism wrapped in red, white and blue."