Screenwriters From England

"Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it's humanly possible because that's why we exist. I believe."

"We got a course in picknicking at the university," said Dr. Bourbon. "It's called Geology, but it's really picknicking."

"The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth."

"You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience."

"Jochum had said, "You keep asking the universe 'How ought I to live?' But it can't answer.""

"'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order it's part of the human lot.'"

"'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'"

"'All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.'"

"'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'"

"'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'"

"'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'"

"To you liberals, of course, goats are just sheep from broken homes."

"In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off."

"Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship."

"A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators."

"The men climb the Andes."

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

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

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

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

"The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts."

"[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was. The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened."

"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

"One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods."

"I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?"

"Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on."

"Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully."

"I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?"

"The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them."

"Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon."

"Go to work on an egg."

"To those whose god is honour, disgrace alone is sin."

"Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail."

"The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism."

"The virtue of Paganism was strength: the virtue of Christianity is obedience."

"Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in the barometer, indicate little else than the changeableness of the weather."

"Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together."

"Smiles are the language of love."

"Purity is the feminine, Truth the masculine, of Honour."

"Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature."

"Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry."

"Nothing is further than Earth from Heaven: nothing is nearer than Heaven to Earth."

"None but a fool is always right."

"In oratory the will must predominate."

"Children always turn toward the light."

"A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides – when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon."

"The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe."

"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."

"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."

"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."