Playwrights From England

"His characters are stretched out, beyond naturalism. People question the parts he wrote for women, but they were idealised rather than misogynistic. His strength was that he was able to pick out human characteristics and stretch them to make intellectual points."

"Jack: I once had a candidate who was deeply concerned about the moral issues raised by myxomatosis. 'Look mate,' I said, 'Rabbits, as far as I'm aware, haven't yet had the vote.' Mind you, I'm an animal lover, too, you know. I've always advocated that the party that introduced family allowances for dogs would sweep the country. And it'll come, it'll come."

"To me [...] the term "costume drama" means something totally pickled. It doesn't interest me in the slightest. What first seized my imagination was the myth of Casanova. Everyone's heard of it. But what does it mean? You hear about the office Casanova, the small-town Casanova, the shop-floor Casanova. He was what we describe as a libertine; but he was concerned with religion and sexual freedom, and these are things we have to address ourselves in now. The libertine is the last possible hero. Traditional heroes are too derisory for words; but the libertine as hero persists. Malice and envy lap their gentle bile around him, but he is the last hero. Of course, I read his memoirs, and I simply don't believe them. They're vain and egotistical, but they are about a man who is hunted by what he is hunting—and that is freedom, expressed in sexual terms."

"Philip Marlow: Minute by minute we make the world. We make our own world."

"Nigel: Why the cheap jokes? Jack: Cheap? When I was a kid, we were made to stay away from school on Empire Days so we wouldn't have to wave one of those little Union Jacks. We were the richest country in the world then, or so I'm told, and my old man bow-legged from malnutrition. Us kids nearly died laughing."

"Nigel: I don't regard clever as a dirty word. Jack: Rule one, it's never clever to appear to be clever. Long words actually hurt people, you know that? Rule two, speak slowly and clearly as though to a group of malignant kids. Rule three, keep it short. Very short. Half-truths take less time than whole ones, old mate. Oh and I see you've let your locks sprout a bit. Get 'em cut, there's a good chap. Rolling stones gather no votes."

"Jack: You'll have to compromise, smile, concern yourself with your public image, measure your words as carefully as possible... and turn yourself into a dutiful party hack! [chuckles] Never mind, Nigel, never mind."

"Philip Marlow: You're the girl in all those songs. De-dum. Nurse Mills: What songs? Philip Marlow: The songs, the songs, the bloody, bloody songs. Nurse Mills: I wish I knew what you were talking about. Philip Marlow: The songs you hear coming up the stair. Nurse Mills: Sorry? Philip Marlow: When you're a child, when you're supposed to be asleep. Those songs."

"Jack: A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one. Dishonest in a way which seems embarrassingly frank. Upright when creeping. And dignified when at his most stupid."

"The blossom is out in full now, it’s plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous."

"Nigel Barton: Eh dad, why do you always walk in the middle of the road? Harry Barton: I don't know. Nigel Barton: What do you think the pavement's for? Harry Barton: Dogs to poop in, by the looks of things!"

"Harry Barton: Clever sod, aren't you? I expect they think the sun shines out of you down at Oxford. Nigel Barton. Up. Harry Barton: What? Nigel Barton. Up, dad. Up. Harry Barton: Aye, and up you, too! Nigel Barton: Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there. Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?"

"My only regret is to die four pages too soon."

"Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica's uncle, but rewritten by Jessica, both of whom, in the third episode, turn out to have been authored by a journalist called Jeff, who turns out himself, in the final scene, to have been the invented creature of a writer who is none other than 'Dennis Potter'."

"Georgie Pringle: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity."

"As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do...) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse."

"Miss Tillings: Stand up, Nigel Barton! Well, Nigel, do you know anything about this? I can't believe it was you! Nigel Barton: No, Miss! Miss Tillings: Then what do you know about it? Nigel Barton: I think - I think I might have had the daffodil, Miss— Miss Tillings: You might have had it? What do you mean, boy? Speak up! Nigel Barton: The stem was all broke and somebody gave it to me, Miss. Miss Tillings: Who gave it to you? Nigel Barton: Ooh, I don't like to say, Miss. Miss Tillings: You better had, Barton, and quick about it. Nigel Barton: Georgie Pringle, Miss."

"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth."

"It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)"

"Lord Peter Wimsey: A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

"Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him."

"Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame."

"What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead."

"By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party."

"You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent, even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke."

"Nigel Barton (On TV): I feel I don't belong here, that's my trouble. Interviewer (on TV): Well, where do you belong? At home? Harry Barton: Of course! Nigel Barton (on TV): No, I'm afraid I don't. Now it hurts to say this, of course, but it's the truth. Back at home, in the village, in the workingmen's club, with people I went to school with, I'm so much on the defensive, you see. They suspect me of making qualitative judgments about their environment, you understand, but it's not that I wish to do so. Yet I even find my own father looking at me oddly some times, waiting to pounce on some remark, some expression in my face, watching me like a hawk. I don't feel at home in either place. I don't belong. It's a tightrope between two different worlds, and I'm walking it. Harry Barton: You're a bloody liar, Nigel!"

"Potter was in hospital for three months last summer and he has been into hospital seven times in the last 10 years. He doesn't like to talk about his illness, just as he doesn't like to talk about how really well he gets along with the BBC. "I think it is a remarkable organisation," he says, "but I don't think this should be said too often in public." Potter also loves the idea of [[w:Mary Whitehouse|Mrs [Mary] Whitehouse]]. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on the walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority. He likes Mr Ross McWhirter too. "The worst thing you can say in England is 'I'll get the law on you,' and here comes the man and he does it.""

"Jack: (to camera) My office! (indicates mess) I'm sorry about all this, but we in the Labour Party link drabness with idealism, see. I'm a paid agent of the party, but whenever I need to know anything I have to ring up Conservative Central Office. It's a very plush place, that - carpets plucking at your bleeding ankles. You see, they link drabness with idealism, too."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless."

"Harriet Vane: But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job? Miss de Vine: Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."

"Freddie Arbuthnot*: "...mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery.""

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it – that is at the bottom of the ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ."

"Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether."

"The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. (Ch. 21)"

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important. Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons."

"Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct."

"And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home."

"Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client."

"The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window."

"Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle."

"Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor... and brains... life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed... and that would be jolly too."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax."