Words matter. These are the best Craig Brown Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.
Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.
Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.
How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and – perhaps most of all – its unpluggable ‘analysts.’
Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.
The first sign builders are on their way is when – hey, presto! – a skip appears outside your house.
One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.
The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.
By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.
Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.
You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.
Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.
Cleanliness is the scourge of art.
As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.
More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.
It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.
Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.
Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.
People think of waves as going in an orderly crash – whoosh – crash – whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time.
Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.
A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.
Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.
