People From Manchester

"Here he is. All the way from Salford. He's not my cup of tea but you might like him."

"One of the things that is his inability to contact him. He's never had a 'phone. And before the days when mobile 'phones were popular you had to 'phone his mam....."

"I soon got a job as a fire-watcher at the Royal Naval Dockyard, the main employer in Plymouth. If anybody asked how many people worked there, the answer was always the same: about ten per cent."

"Having been a tubercular kid with a malformed physique, I have a dread of any situation where the shedding of garments might be required. I can't even swim."

"I told my dad, who quizzed me about what kind of purse I might reasonably expect for this performance. I told him it was a benefit, all in a good cause, and that I wasn't the only one working for nothing. 'Nothing?' he replied. 'Anybody will employ you for nothing'."

"As a card-carrying nosey-parker and professional obsessive, I read up on the subject and learned that Baudelaire was a real pernickety dresser and a bit of a dude; this was my kind of guy. I too would be an Urban Poet."

"You know, like they say: never trust a thin chef, or a doctor with leprosy."

"At some point, the Mod look had a short-lived Country Life moment, when the gorgeous mohair sheen of the three-button suit gave way to matte autumnal earth tones. Give it a name: fucking brown."

"This guy was going to marmalise me! I mean, where's the kudos in beating up a seven-stone fucking consumptive? I was a self-confessed coward, then as now. My coat of arms has been detailed elsewhere: four white feathers on a field of yellow. Nothing for me is more terrifying than physical pain...."

"[on the fear of a nervous breakdown] I don't think I ever lost this fear. It turned me into a default existentialist by the time I was six: I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss."

"[on his Dad] He didn't share the general public's dim view of the late Joseph Stalin."

"Have I seen Schindler's List? I was on Schindler's list - Dr Schindler my dentist that is."

"I don't think people would describe me as being tall any more, but if you had to describe me back then you would have said 'tall and thin'. You don't really see as much stunted malnourishment nowadays."

"[Luxury item] A boulder of opium twice the size of my own head."

"All my life, all I wanted to be was a professional poet. To me being a professional poet was better than notching up a hat trick at Old Trafford.....You get to wear fine clothes and perfume and nobody pulls you up on it. You get out of bed late in the day and nobody calls you a lazy bastard. A state of reverie and the virtue of idleness are paramount. Any poet will tell you this."

"My advice to any poet; you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a notebook and idleness, those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry."

"Marcel was a modern-day Robin Hood; he would rob from the rich because the poor have no money."

"It was quite a tough school. Put it this way, we had our own coroner."

"I was met with the poet’s greatest enemy; indifference."

"Never leave a bookies with a smile on your face."

"My paternal grandfather, George, had been a regular soldier in India until chucking-out time in 1948, and funnily enough bore an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi (who apparently suffered from corns and bad breath, in other words a supercallousedfragilemysticplaguedwithhalitosis, as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke almost sang)."

"I'm a short-term nostalgic; things were great ten minutes ago. If only I could go back there. At my time of life I suffer from déjà vu and amnesia at the same time; I can't remember what happens next."

"...she took us out on a motor ride to a beach, it was a nudist camp.....What those people do on their time off is their own business, the dirty bastards."

"A suit where I can fall down drunk in a ditch get up the next morning and go on to a wedding; or more likely a funeral at my time of life. I could go to six a week but no man can live on vol-au-vents alone."

"As is often the case a failed marriage led to a successful divorce. We split the house; I got the outside...... It was at that point where I made a promise to myself, I said I'm not going to get married again, I'm just gonna find a woman I don't like and give her everything."

"I always judge people by appearances; don't you anyway? I think clothes are important; that's where the nudist camp falls down."

"Somebody once said that a wedding is a funeral where you can smell your own flowers. Well, that's a harsh judgement in my book. I prefer to see it as a sexual relationship that is recognised by the police."

"I was arrested on the flimsiest of evidence. I was occupying the driver's seat of a car that didn't belong to me."

"Do not go mental, and with that, goodnight."

"Drugs eh! That's the trouble; they're indiscriminate. The good memories go with the fuckin' shit you're tryin' to block out."

"You can count on him. He'll always let you down."

"[Johnny Cash] was in and out with a caution; I had a residential thing going on for Her Majesty's pleasure. So I missed a golden opportunity there while the man in black was still alive, I could have gone up to him and said, 'Eh Johnny, get over it! Some of us have done some serious bird'."

"If the water flow down by a gradual natural channel, its potential energy is gradually converted into heat by fluid friction, according to an admirable discovery made by Mr Joule of Manchester above twelve years ago, which has led to the greatest reform that physical science has experienced since the days of Newton. From that discovery, it may be concluded with certainty that heat is not matter, but some kind of motion among the particles of matter; a conclusion established, it is true, by Sir Humphrey Davy and Count Rumford at the end of last century, but ignored by even the highest scientific men during a period of more than forty years."

"Mr Joule... fully established the relations of equivalence among the energies of chemical affinity, of heat, of combination or combustion, of electrical currents in the galvanic battery, of electrical currents in magnetoelectric machines, of engines worked by galvanism, and of all the varied and interchangeable manifestations of calorific action and mechanical force which accompany them. These researches, with the theory of animal heat and motion in relation to the heat of combustion of the food, and the theory of the phenomena presented by shooting stars, due to the same penetrating investigator, have afforded to the author of the present communication the chief groundwork for his speculations."

"It was in the year 1843 that I read a paper "On the Calorific Effects of Magneto-Electricity and the Mechanical Value of Heat" to the Chemical Section of the British Association assembled at Cork. With the exception of some eminent men, among whom I recollect with pride Dr. Apjohn, the president of the Section, the Earl of Rosse, Mr. Eaton Hodgkinson, and others, the subject did not excite much general attention; so that when I brought it forward again at the meeting in 1847, the chairman suggested that, as the business of the section pressed, I should not read my paper, but confine myself to a short verbal description of my experiments. This I endeavoured to do, and discussion not being invited, the communication would have passed without comment if a young man had not risen in the section, and by his intelligent observations created a lively interest in the new theory. The young man was William Thomson, who had two years previously passed the University of Cambridge with the highest honour, and is now probably the foremost scientific authority of the age."

"Not only do I not have a mobile 'phone, I haven't got a computer. I don't employ any artificial intelligence of any kind. People say to me, "Oh, you should have a computer, they can do this...." I say "Look, I know how fuckin' great they are. That's why, that's the very reason I can't have one." You know I'll just watch a bit of Dion and the Belmonts, then I'll go out...oh, no, what was that Elvis film....oh that reminds me, that Grace Kelly movie...I'll just download this Marx Brothers' clip. You know what I mean, I'd never get out of the fuckin' house. I'd fuckin' die. You'd find me dead with a pizza box with mi arse in the air and mi pants round mi ankles in front of a flickerin' fuckin' computer screen. He never went out when we bought him that computer, he never went out again, he never went through the fuckin' door. The milk stopped being delivered and he fuckin' died."

"My object has been, first to discover correct principles and then to suggest their practical development."

"Everyone thinks they'll make a better judge than any judge don't they? You see these nonces getting off with a six quid fine and being given a house next door to a school. And you think 'I wouldn't have done that'."

"O'Connell: Let's have a break for the news so we can think about our careers."

"You would have made a player [...] You're beautiful on the ball, you're creative."

"Hall: Give cricket a shot in the bails it needs!""

"Hall: Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a wonderful country - I've been there umpteen times and it is being brought to extinction by [[Robert Mugabe|[Robert] Mugabe]]. The average life expectancy is 33, so if you are not dying from AIDS, malnutrition, starvation, deprivation or stagnation, don your flannels, black up, play leather on willow. Mugabe as captain and witch doctor, imagine him out at Lord's casting a tincture of bats' tongues and gorillas' gonads."

"O'Connell: Are we still on air?"

"O'Connell: Which sporting nation would you like to see have a renaissance?"

"His use of the English language - especially in football reporting - has made him an icon with the youth of today."

"Hall: This is all nonsense [and] you're getting all hot under the collar about nothing. It's the Great British patois. All great truths begin as blasphemies, so why castigate [[w:Wayne Rooney|[Wayne] Rooney]], young tender sweet bud-on-the-vine Rooney. Your average ten year old can instruct you in oral and anal sex."

"Kelly: Welcome to the last ever Fighting Talk!"

"O'Connell: It's been suggested [...] by teachers that live football should be shown after kids have gone to bed. Is swearing in football really such a big deal?"

"It saddens me that the game has sold its soul to television. What we see now is a televisual game, and it cannot bear the weight of its publicity."

"When Steve McClaren said that he wasn't in the entertainment business, I asked him what he was doing in football, because the game is all about entertainment. Fans go to watch their team win, sure, but they also want to enjoy the game while they're about it"