Top 35 Richard Coles Quotes

I started playing the piano aged four in an effort to copy Grandpa, who was constantly showing off and entertaining us all, singing comic songs on his baby grand.

In my opinion, the best of the knockout cookery series is ‘MasterChef’, which I have watched since Loyd Grossman’s day, back in the 1990s.

I think that Christians should have confidence, we have always been part of the mainstream conversation, and if we don’t join in often what you hear gets hectoring and mad, just people on the margins.

I got lucky with my parents. They were unfailingly loving and supportive, which gave me confidence about my place in the world.

I don’t have any ambitions. I am looking forward to retiring, or at least having more time. When I was young I wanted more stuff, now I am older, I want more time.

I am not in favour of hierarchies that grant privileges to members who fail to uphold those values – there are plenty of those – but the monarchy is really the Queen, who is of unimpeachable integrity and the longest serving head of state in the world, and who never puts a foot wrong.

I completely understand why people would find the Church intolerable. I’m not the least bit surprised when people seek to leave it, though I miss them and I wish they’d stay. But I sometimes think you leave to come back, and that’s certainly true in my case.

I was licensed and installed as 59th Vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, in Northamptonshire, in 2011.

Generally on a Saturday I come home wreathed in media glamour having interviewed a former Krankie or someone, and suddenly I am back in the world of orange blossom and bells.

This unthinking assumption of moral virtue on the Left is frustrating. I saw someone on Facebook talking about capitalist scum, he was angry and thought it was OK because his anger was righteous.

I am loathe to say I have a strategy in the broadcasting work I do, but I do think it is possible to be a priest who has something to contribute to mainstream media as long as you aren’t completely mad.

Music has given me a decent pension. I am in that rare position for a clergyman of having some provision for my retirement. Thank you, young people of Europe.

I’m looking for some centrist political party to find a home in and it’s not there, actually.

In the church I am very accountable, to the parish and the deanery; in the media thing I am not really accountable, I am out there on my own as a sort of busy, recognised religious person.

There’s more of me on Twitter than there is in real life.

But it’s true I hadn’t realised quite how much the discipleship of Jesus Christ would involve keeping up with email.

What I wear identifies me as a priest. I don’t agree with all this trying to appear ‘normal’. If you want that to be normal, don’t take off your dog collar and then put it on again, because what you’re doing is playing along with the view that wearing one makes you odd.

I was born into the Church of England but in the most nominal way possible you can imagine, so it’s Christmas and Easter. And then like a great many clergy in the Church of England I actually got nobbled by being a chorister.

I don’t think you need to justify faith, faith is its own justification.

I love talking about myself.

The dog collar is fascinating to people, when it doesn’t repel. I’ve got used to being shouted at in the street.

The thing I worry about with religion isn’t to do much with forgetting Christmas. It’s to do with religion being angry and violent.

I don’t think of myself as a maverick at all. Quite the opposite – I really think of myself as quite conventional but dispersed over unusual territory.

I still feel a spike of anticipation when ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ strikes up and, in these andropausal years, I am unexpectedly moved by ‘Away in a Manger’.

I spend much of my time in a broadly liberal secular world but I don’t belong to it, I belong somewhere else.

The thought of having sclerosis of the synapses is alarming. I wonder if in later life I will pay the price for having overstimulated my mental apparatus in my twenties.

God chooses to arrive among the poor and the insignificant and the politically awkward, so what are we missing when we overlook them?

A certain check to the sentimentality and commercialism of Christmas is the cluster of bereavements that often arrives towards the end of the year.

You find you have a lot of friends when you are rich and idle.

I suppose I’ve always had a very genuine curiosity about religion. I loved the atmosphere of churches, the ethos; I adored Evensong.

Food as sport is nothing new. To a vicar, especially, church catering has represented the conduct of war by other means for many years.

I frequently find myself praying for punk, for something to come along and upset everybody and ignite a few fires and behave disreputably.

In corporate life, I have noticed, it is getting harder and harder to say that things are bad.

Like most people, I cook about a dozen dishes, over and over again, and to stretch the menu has meant stretching my competence to breaking point.

My dachshunds are not substitutes for children. But the pattering of tiny feet around the place is a joy.