Dec 25, 1908 - Dec 21, 1999
was an English writer and raconteur.
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
Flowers are words which even a baby can understand.
Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission, they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head, make their point of constructive criticism and continue on in calm forbearance. Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their<br />whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method<br />of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists<br />solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Never keep up with Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we<br />hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about<br />us.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Vice is its own reward
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
