Memoirists From England

"We will have to embark on a change so radical, a revolution so quiet and yet so total, that it will go far beyond the programme for a parliament."

"No one can deny that today the major cause of the inflation from which we are suffering is the excessive wage demands... It is the responsibility of an employer, direct or indirect...if they go their own way and accede to irresponsible wage demands which damage their own firms and create a loss of jobs for those who work in them, then the Government are certainly not going to step in and rescue them from the consequences of their own actions."

"You will see that our strategy is clear. It is to reorganise the functions of Government, to leave more to individual or to corporate effort, to make savings in Government expenditure, to provide room for greater incentives to men and women and to firms and businesses. Our strategy is to encourage them more and more to take their own decisions, to stand on their own feet, to accept responsibility for themselves and for their families."

"One lonely voice still shouting labour!"

"This was a secret meeting on a secret tour which nobody is supposed to know about. It means that there are men, and perhaps women, in this country walking around with eggs in their pockets, just on the off-chance of seeing the Prime Minister."

"This would, at a stroke, reduce the rise in prices, increase production and reduce unemployment."

"We may be a small island. We're not a small people... For the last six years the Government of this country...have let us be treated as second rate. They even plan for us to stay second rate. Because that's what Labour policies mean... Now I don't intend to stand by and see this happen... Do you want a better tomorrow? ... That's what I will work for with all my strength and with all my heart. I give you my word and I will keep my word."

"It would not be in the interests of the Community that its enlargement should take place except with the full-hearted consent of the parliaments and its peoples of the new member countries."

"Everyone who is already here must be treated as equal before the law."

"The conclusion of Mr. Powell's latest speech as I understand it—certainly its implication—is that we should do nothing to help boroughs and cities like Birmingham and Wolverhampton that have these problems, in the hope that if only we let the housing get bad enough, the schools overcrowded enough, and the social services overburdened enough, the immigrants will go away of their own accord, and the problems will disappear. It is an example of man's inhumanity to man which is absolutely intolerable in a Christian, civilized society."

"My position has remained the same. I have had more to do, at first hand, with European policy than any other person in politics today."

"I have always had a hidden wish, a frustrated desire, to run a hotel."

"If there are any who believe that immigrants to this country, most of whom have already become British citizens, could be forcibly deported because they are coloured people...then that I must repudiate, absolutely and completely."

"That, although a century out of date, would certainly be a distinctive, different policy. But it would not be a Conservative policy and it would not provide a Conservative alternative. For better or worse the central Government is already responsible, in some way or another, for nearly half the activities of Britain. It is by far the biggest spender and the biggest employer."

"I have told Mr Powell that I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions. This is unacceptable from one of the leaders of the Conservative Party"

"Robin Day: But how low does your personal rating, among your own supporters, have to go before you consider yourself a liability to the party you lead? Edward Heath: Well, popularity isn't everything. In fact it isn't the most important thing. What matters is doing what you believe to be right, and that's what I've always tried to do and I shall go on doing. The question doesn't arise."

"Action, not words."

"The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community."

"The British government and the British people have been through a searching debate during the last few years on the subject of their relations with Europe. The result of this debate has been our present application. It was a decision arrived at, not on any narrow or short-term grounds, but as a result of a thorough assessment over a considerable period of the needs of our own country, of Europe and of the free world as a whole. We recognise it as a great decision, a turning point in our history, and we take it in all seriousness. In saying that we wish to join the EEC, we mean that we desire to become full, whole-hearted and active members of the European Community in its widest sense and to go forward with you in the building of a new Europe."

"I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share."

"It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, Be yourself no matter what they say"

"The people of Northern Ireland are ruled by a regime that is less concerned with morality than with religious doctrine. Their sectarianism is so divisive that, if you say you are an atheist, they ask, 'But is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you do not believe?'"

"If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family."

"Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going."

"'You talk for talking’s sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking’s sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing’s sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living’s sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world."

"My fingers will not type the words "her money became a burden to her" but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant — better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs."

"Bit by bit, I was becoming the almost acceptable face of homosexuality."

"We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing — still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry."

"An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."

"Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH."

"It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world."

"To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures — to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name — I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I’m just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave."

"To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices."

"I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information."

"He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls."

"Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.""

"Many [hooligans] discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation."

"Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is for ever."

"The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom."

"The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing.""

"I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist."

"I became one of the stately homos of England."

"Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours."

"I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east."

"There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable."

"The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other."

"When stripped, I looked less like "Il David" than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis."

"Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man."

"Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing."

"If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being."