Alan Quotes

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

We usually don't look. We overlook.

I'm me, I live from film to mouth.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

The judge also has a truth he wants to hide: He often hasn't been completely candid in describing the facts or the law.

If people know we expect good things from them, they will in most cases go to great lengths to live up to our expectations.

And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place. Any God worth "believing in" would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

I think most defense attorneys honestly believe the principle that says, 'Better 10 guilty go free than even one possibly innocent person be convicted.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

I will continue to fight for justice, fairness, and constitutional rights until my dying breath.

I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who's too big to fail.

The more you recognize the immense good within you, the more you magnetize immense good around you.

We also knew it would be difficult, because of the financial condition of the family, for me to go to college.

Edinburgh is an experience A city of enormous gifts Whose streets sing of history Whose cobbles tell tales.

There's no leaving Edinburgh, No shifting it around: it stays with you, always.

No one will ever forget that night, and what it meant for this country. But I will never forget the man and what he meant to me.

The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.

Revisit your past only to recognize how far you have come.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Miles and miles and miles.

There is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love.

It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.

I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.

I would renounce, therefore, the attempt to create heaven on earth, and focus instead on reducing the hell.

It's almost like he has Dr. Who's Tardis because he always turns up on time. (on Teddy Sheringham)

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.

To change your mind under the direction of the wisdom of the heart is a brush stroke on the masterpiece you are delivering to the world.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

Have a go. Anybody can do it.

I love a film where I get squished by two dumpsters or I fly through the air.

You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.

It's actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you'll be okay.

Well, if you ask any filmmaker how they got into it, everyone came a different route. Ive never actually watched another director work.

Most directors have little lists in their heads of people they really want to work with.

He hit that one like an arrow

He's passing the ball like Idi Amin.

I was kind of a selfish child, who always wanted things his way, and I've kind of taken that over into my relationship with the world.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I'm a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I've lived my life backwards.

I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories.

So die as though your funeral Ushered you through the doors that led Into a stately banquet hall Where heroes banqueted.

If we can come up with all sorts of imaginative ways in which people die, then I really don't see what the problem is with coming up with imaginative ways in which people can procreate.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret.