Words matter. These are the best A. A. Gill Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I don’t know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.
The more there is on offer, the more you don’t want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.
Other people’s traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They’re nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn’t want to live with one.
The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical.
It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.
The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who’s got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.
You can propose marriage naked or in handcuffs, but no one is going to agree to forsake all others for a man in shorts. You can’t declare war in shorts or deliver a eulogy in shorts.
Learning Jimmy Carr riffs off by heart is not the way to anyone’s heart, unless you’re Jimmy Carr. And remember, the two most attractive things in a man is a sense of danger and being able to make a girl feel really safe.
Have you noticed that almost all the change in the world goes to women? When was the last time you had a five pence piece? Exactly. In a Christmas pudding. All the rest of it is in women’s handbags.
You see, the problem with Dave Cameron is that people know who he is. The less people know about him, the more he’s likely to get re-elected.
Songs are all poetry, and they don’t make any sense.
The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.
The answer is that if God exists, he doesn’t seem to mind if you believe in him or not.
When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.
Have you ever wondered why the rich and privileged care about, or even bother with, the gift bag? Because they don’t need this stuff. If they wanted it, they could afford to buy it, without blinking. But they love the gift bag, beyond reason.
Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie.
My only piece of advice is that all of you consider every single text and Snapchat that you ever make as also being shared with your partner, because they all check your phones all the time – trust me on this one.
In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet.
No British TV company could ever make a series like ‘The West Wing’ about British politics. It would beggar credibility. No one could write it with a straight face, or perform it without giggling.
For men, privacy means not being told stuff that would hurt. For women, secrecy is having stuff go on behind your back.
Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.
Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else – university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.
Cowboy boots you can’t wear unless you actually are a cowboy or in a Status Quo tribute band, or over 60; there’s something about a retiring gent in cowboy boots that looks sort of presidential.
And learn to tie a bow – it’s not difficult and there’s no excuse for either a clip-on or the hideous Hollywood straight tie.
There are five great ages of man – five moments when you need to reevaluate everything, clear out the cupboard and the wardrobe, and most importantly, your head. They are 13, 20, 30, 40 and 60. All men need to know this.
I’m frightened of my innate vanity. I mean: the suits lined with scarves? Even I know the warning signs. I could quite easily end up in a tiny Playboy mansion, all on my own.
London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren’s churches and ushered in the Georgian city.
Really, I like the future. I appreciate my automatic alarm-call necklace in case I get lost and confused in a mall. I appreciate the watch that tells the hospital my blood pressure’s gone ballistic. I like my computer, just as long as it doesn’t get ideas above its workstation.
The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.
Texting isn’t writing. It’s not like letter writing. Texting is short scriptwriting. It’s a collaborative soap opera where nothing happens.
The truth is a mayor can actually do very little to alter the course of a huge city run by the free market that is home to banking – the engine room of capitalism.
Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.
All people from small islands dance funny.
I generally only eat one meal a day, which is pretty unusual for a restaurant reviewer. It’s not that I have a problem with food; I’ll eat anything that doesn’t involve a bet, a dare, or an initiation ceremony.
You don’t have a choice about fashion or aesthetics – you’re in it, whether you like it or not.
Nature gave you your look and there’s only a limited amount you can do about that, but what you wear is the skin you choose for yourself.
Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left in the world. He would win an election in any one of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity.
If you’re bored, it’s because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It’s the most interesting thing you’ll ever do.
One of the small joys that’s easy to miss in London is the blue plaques on buildings. These are put up to commemorate the famous on the houses they lived in.
When you look at traditions closely, examine what they really are, you realize they’re made up of layers and layers of deferrals, delays, indecisions, tomorrows and long lunches.
Gifts are an important and necessary part of our collective lives. We need to give and we need to allow others to give.
Suits are malevolent magicians’ sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.
Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It’s while writing that I think most deeply about things.
Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.
Boredom is not a thing. It’s not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things and conditions.
Women’s handbags are incredibly heavy. You rarely get to pick one up and, when you do, you wonder why anyone carries so much stuff around all day.
We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colours of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck.
Shorts are silly. Men in shorts are silly men. And silly is the very worst thing a man can be.
To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.
I’m terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.
People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it’ll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn’t.
If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
So much of life is not about whether you’re good or bad, or right or wrong, or can afford or not afford – it’s just about timing.
Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.
Bald isn’t like being ethnic or disabled. Everyone can and will make jokes about it and expect you to laugh good-naturedly, which you will.
People who know there is a god and people who know there isn’t live in exactly the same world. Same number of hours in the day, same weather, same football results. They both love their children and die of the same diseases.
I’ve often been accused of dressing too well. I’ve always been fascinated by fashion, though I don’t think I’m particularly fashionable.
A lot of London’s image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.
Personal adornment is the only cultural form that everybody in the world takes part in.
A cravat is the only item of named after Croatians. Balkan mercenaries were brought to Paris by Louis XIV. Their strange and exotic attire attracted the French bon hommes, who were wearing formal ruffs, and who immediately took to the simple and relaxed military cloth tied at the neck.
