Gyles Brandreth > Quotes

“I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance

“Those who pay their bills on time are soon forgotten. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance

“Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused, I know that I have touched the stars.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder: A Mystery

“There is no friendship possible between men and women[...]. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”
― Gyles Brandreth

“Don’t switch off. Stay engaged. Resist distraction. Concentrate. Focus. Be present. Smell the coffee. Taste the food. Listen to the speech. Keep that Latin accurate. Stop thinking about what’s coming next, stop checking the mobile, and relish what’s happening now. Seize the day. For all you know, it’s the only one you’ve got. Live in the moment.”
― Gyles Brandreth, The 7 Secrets of Happiness: An Optimist's Journey

“One should always be suspicious of a woman who tells you that her past was burnt in the flames of a schoolhouse in Peshawar.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, zynders to zynders: even those who protest that they never go to funerals have to in the end.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Word Play: A cornucopia of puns, anagrams and other contortions and curiosities of the English language

“To err is human. To arr is pirate … What a difference a single misplaced letter can make.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“Change is the salt in the soup of life.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“Sir Peter Tapsell: ‘You cannot ask the British Prime Minister to autograph a bottle of table wine. You really cannot.’ ‘It is English,’ I bleated. ‘Non-vintage?’ ‘Er … yes.’ ‘Good God, what is the party coming to?”
― Gyles Brandreth, Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries

“In life there are two types of people: those who catch the waiter’s eye and those who don’t.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance: A Mystery

“Oscar sat back and looked at me appraisingly. “I need to think. And to think I must have oysters and champagne.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance: A Mystery

“Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shame on him who thinks evil of this.’ The phrase”
― Gyles Brandreth, Philip: The Final Portrait

“La personalidad es algo muy misterioso. No puede valorarse a un hombre por lo que hace. Puede cumplir la ley y ser despreciable. Puede incumplir la ley y aun así ser un caballero. Puede ser malo sin haber hecho nunca nada malo. Puede cometer un pecado contra la sociedad y tomar conciencia, gracias a ese pecado, de su propia perfección...”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance

“It is curious how men who are good friends, close friends, true friends, who may have been on the most intimate and familiar terms over any number of years, can nevertheless know next to nothing of one another’s love-lives.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance: A Mystery

“Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?: Or, the Life-Saving Importance of Correct Punctuation, Grammar, and Good English

“trug”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders: A Mystery

“I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we’ve been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than ‘less’) mistakes. All right? Is ‘alright’ all right? You’ll find out right here.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“Another survey revealed that while nine out of ten primary school children could identify a Dalek, only a third could recognise and name a magpie.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“Life's aim, if it has one, is to be always looking for temptations - and there are not nearly enough of them, I find. I sometimes pass the whole day without coming across a single one. It makes one so nervous about the future.”
― Gyles Brandreth

“The way you use the commas should give your sentence its correct meaning — viz: The men, who were handsome, found partners. There, the relative clause tells us that all the men were handsome and all found partners. The men who were handsome found partners. With this restrictive relative clause, without commas, we are discovering something quite different: here, only the men who were handsome found partners.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“He looked closely into Vyvyan’s round and smiling face and said solemnly, “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance: A Mystery

“A secret should be kept a secret,” murmured Conan Doyle, now picking up crumbs from his plate with his forefinger. “Once it is no longer a secret, it becomes a serpent—it goes where it will.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

“I mean it,' said Bosie seriously. 'I'd like to murder him, in cold blood.'
'Well, you can't, Bosie,' said Oscar, 'leastways, not tonight.'
'Why not?' demanded Bosie petulantly.
'It's Sunday, Bosie,' said Oscar, 'and a gentleman never murders his father on a Sunday. You should know that. Did they teach you nothing at Winchester?”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death

“Mr. Bellotti sounds interesting,” I said, amused. “No,” replied Oscar seriously, “Bellotti is complex without being interesting.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance: A Mystery

“As you will be aware, gentlemen, I have made it my life’s work to entertain the working classes, enrage the middle classes, and fascinate the aristocracy—but I do believe I’ve just met my match. Accrington ’Arry here is in a class of his own, beyond my reach.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder: A Mystery

“If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“While an Edwardian dandy might have wooed his dimpled darling with lovey-dovey terms of endearment, a modern Romeo might use a more contemporary line in flattery: ‘Bae, you is one cool, sick, mean bitch.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Have You Eaten Grandma?

“The newspapers of today chronicle with degrading avidity the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatever. I must give them up.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder: A Mystery