People From Liverpool

"They were always going to be the biggest band in the world. We wanted nothing to do with success the way U2 saw it. It wasn't to do with conquering the world; it was to do with those lads, like me and Ian Curtis, who liked the Silver Surfer and Bowie. At some point everyone seemed to go toward that Live Aid goal of being seen everywhere, in every sodding street, in every sodding nook and cranny in the world. I never wanted that."

"I only ever wanted, since the age of 13, to be the best singer of the best band in the world."

"How I wanna be exciting is by hitting a great note and people going, "Whoo!" I'm more Tony Bennett. He sings notes that don't exist! The hooter, the hair, the man's like a chiseled Roman god. With the Bunnymen, I was much more Mick Jagger holdin' me willy on stage and wearin' no undies and all that. Now I'm more Cary Grant."

"We weren't managed from the word go, like U2 or Simple Minds, to get bigger and bigger and take over the planet."

"I listen back to some of Porcupine now and... well, not blush exactly, we were great and all that... but we could have been just anyone, you know?"

"People here are always asking me, "Can you play 'Lips Like Sugar' on an acoustic guitar?" And I'm like, "No!" It was an OK song, I suppose, but it didn't sound like us. We just got sucked into a new mentality on that last album, the sound of Radio America. It did great here, but by then I just thought we weren't good enough any more. It was pretty happening, the States was building and building but it didn't feel good on stage. We weren't really communicating as mates and stuff. I mean, I was used to believing that we were the best group going."

"I like Americans now. They're dead nice. More polite. They aren't like the English, 'Ey Mac, comin' for a pint round the corner, yer twat?' I hate all that stuff, all that wanting you to be like you were in 1982. I've made up me mind that where I'm gonna regain the lost ground is over here in America."

"From when Oasis first started I thought, "Thank Christ someone has picked up on that simple technique of saying they're the best thing on the planet and just fronting it." Liam is a part of a great ancestry of lippy, insecure bastard frontmen."

"When all's said and done, I wish them well. I wasn't just the one that ranted a bit in interviews and thought he was great. I thought the group were great."

"People who leave groups generally sell less records. I feel better and more worthwhile selling less than the last Bunnymen record. I feel more important."

"I wasn't into glam-rock. I was just into him. I never really saw him as glam-rock. Actually, I liked T-Rex too. Electric Warrior was great. But Bowie made me think. I just got lost in it—Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust—that era. I thought it was just magical, although I was dead impressionable then. But I though he looked brilliant—I still do. I hated the following he had though, especially around the Aladdin Sane era—it just destroyed his mystique. He doesn't hold that mystique for me now—he's just a normal bloke, I suppose. But I remember in 1972 when he was on the telly doing "Starman"—I couldn't believe it! It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It's meant to be a bit of an embarrassing admission now to have liked that kind of thing, but I really did. And I remember when I grew out of it and I couldn't get into Ziggy Stardust the way I used to. I felt really sad about it. I played it and nothing happened."

"I'm basically an 'appy person, but I'm just not into fun things that much."

"It did cause problems at one point. Part of it was down to the name of the group—people tended to think I was Echo. That's why we named the drum-machine Echo because I definitely wasn't."

"There was even talk at one point of getting Del Shannon to produce our first album."

"I was always really dubious about them actually. I'd heard some of Morrison's rambling poetic stuff, and I thought it was really pretentious... But now I think they're a great group, I must admit."

"I mean, even Joy Division are a bit over-rated, I think. They're very good live, but on record..."

"It feels like there's hundreds of bands in Liverpool. There's some okay ones... But really we're the only one I can think of as being a potentially great band..."

"Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But—why did you kick me down stairs?"

"When you read the sacred Scriptures, or any other book, never think how you read, but what you read."

"Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right..."

"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process."

"That's the main trouble with the two nations: bad Brits are snobs, bad Americans are slobs."

"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting."

"The men climb the Andes."

"You think you can get away, but you can't. I'll follow you home and I'll shout jokes through your letterbox."

"I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months. I don't like to interrupt her."

"Television is like a great monster, eating your gags as fast as you say them."

"My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, 'Is this a joke?"

"Comedy should never be over-analysed. It's either funny or it isn't. There's a subtle difference between those who say funny things and those who say things funny."

"Laughter is the greatest music in the world and audiences come to my shows to escape the cares of life. They don't want to be embarrassed or insulted. They want to laugh and so do I - which is probably why it works."

"I had an idyllic childhood and when my parents bought me a Punch and Judy Show and a ventriloquist's dummy, I'd perform anywhere, anytime. My parents were wonderful when I told them I wanted to be an entertainer."

"Did you know that a laugh is something that comes out of a hole in your face? Anywhere else and you're in dead trouble!"

"I think it would a good idea now if all the ugly ones came and sat down near the front! You have! Good!"

"So it turns out that if you bang two halves of a horse together, it doesn't make the sound of a coconut."

"I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say."

"Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters."

"She opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood."

"They were burning the stubbled fields and a great stain of smoke flooded the horizon. Nothing amiss here, nothing derelict, the roofs newly thatched, the hedges trimmed, the gardens bright with flowers."

"We would do better to make our judgments on society from a study of literature, for in fiction the concept of division becomes fact — from Disraeli's Sybil with its subtitle 'The Two Nations' and Mrs Gaskell's North & South, through George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy to Lawrence's ' and the ' of , the novel is choked with the theme of a people divided not only by borders but by circumstances of birth and opportunity."

"My husband, Austin Davies, taught John Lennon at . In fact, the night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, —the one who died—and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles again."

"Beryl Bainbridge, who has died of cancer aged 75, wore her hard-won recognition lightly. She was acknowledged as one of the best novelists of her generation, and was made a in 2000, but she lost none of her black humour or raffish image to her new status as a literary grande dame. Her prolific output included 18 novels, three of which were filmed, two collections of short stories, several plays for stage and television, and many articles, essays, columns and reviews. She won the and two , but although five of her novels reached the shortlist – The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), Every Man for Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998) – none of them won it. She bore the disappointment with a wit and detachment honed by a lifetime's practice."

"If he isn't named Footballer of the Year, football should be stopped and the men who picked any other player should be sent to the Kremlin."

"If Shankly was the Anfield foreman, Paisley was the brickie, ready to build an empire with his own hands.""

"Don't go for the player, go for the ball."

"I have never started a fight in my life but I have finished a few... sometimes I shudder when I think about what I have done."

"I don't think tackling is at all acceptable these days... there are a lot of cheats in the game, too."

"Tommy Smith wasn't born, he was quarried."

"Your good friends naturally bring out the best and sometimes the worst sides of you, and you go from there. I'm not a rusher. I'm horribly suspicious at first of people. It's being everyone's friend on the telly - when I meet someone they expect me to instantly be that best mate for them and occasionally you get up with a shit in your pocket and you don't want to talk to anyone. I don't mind a gab but occasionally I really am rude. And occasionally I really enjoy it."

"I don't believe in coincidences. I believe that if you're doing the right thing, you are handed back pieces of yourself. It's like something goes right for you and this will keep you going for six weeks, and then your next test is going to be designed for you."