Keith McNally > Quotes

“And I still have no time for people who bask in being right, or anyone religious who won’t admit that if they were born to different parents, chances are they’d have a totally different religion. I still hate those who use knowledge as a weapon, but most of all I hate those who don’t have the fucking guts to change their minds. Especially about the things they’re most certain of.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“All my tables for two are twenty-six inches long by twenty-four inches wide.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Peter loathed sentimentality and enjoyed reading authors who felt the same way. One of these was Auberon Waugh, the son of novelist Evelyn Waugh. There was a Waugh quote Peter often referred to: “Sentimentality is the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine feeling.” I tend to agree with this.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I was unable to break down without observing myself breaking down.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Just as things thrive by not being observed, I believe achievements decrease in value by being talked about.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I was still the same person inside, and despite my banged-up body and marred speech, I could still build restaurants. Most importantly, I still had my reputation. That hadn’t changed. And in the end, that’s all we’re left with. “Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself.” —Othello”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Given how often Alan was irritated by Jonathan, I find it hard to understand why for thirty years he lived across the road from him. It was either the ease with which he could show up unannounced for meals, selflessly provided by Rachel, or perhaps it’s related to the old Woody Allen joke: “You know, this guy goes into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Po Ming was an exceptional man with a kind face and rare integrity. I once read that great people never regret anything. I regret almost everything. But most of all I regret not saying goodbye to Po Ming.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“A few years later, after reading something written by the painter Giorgio Morandi, I had an inkling: “One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it’s necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Sentimentality is the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine feeling.” I tend to agree with this.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“No longer wanting to work in a world I now viewed as hollow, I took a job in London’s Smithfield meat market instead. I would soon lose my eagerness for manual work, but having just returned from some of the world’s poorest countries, I viewed all blue-collar jobs as being virtuous. (Feeling virtuous, I would later discover, is the polar opposite to being virtuous.)”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“As the novelist Hermann Hesse once wrote: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.” (Hesse wrote Siddhartha at the Sands Hotel.)”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Hardy has become one of my favorite novelists. I also like his poetry.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“The theater critic Kenneth Tynan once said, “A critic is a man who knows the way, but cannot drive a car.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Performance. Starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, Performance is also the most interesting film I’ve ever seen about identity.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Most fans of The Third Man harp on about the Ferris wheel scene, in which the nefarious Harry Lime—played with unseemly charm by Orson Welles—lectures his best friend on the flaws of democracy: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“In those pre-Internet days”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“immediately tore it to shreds. Two months later I forgot all about her.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“During a personal crisis, the importance of work is often undervalued. “Take time off work,” people typically say when someone’s depressed. My advice would be to work more, not less. When all else seems lost, work—of any kind—provides the one thing we need to keep going: a sense of purpose.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“And I still believe that only idiots think creativity comes from harmony, and only those who don’t have a clue about poetry believe it’s a declaration of emotion and not an escape from it. I’m still suspicious of those who place self-expression above self-awareness and of people who have a romantic view of art. I still hate those who don’t believe that the more vile the crime, the more crucial due process becomes.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“good design “is all about the details.” This isn’t true. Good design is all about the right details. Good design is also about what you don’t do, what you refrain from doing. Unfortunately, I don’t always take my own advice.”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. GEORGE ORWELL”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“Hitchens claimed: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” If I believed in God, I would have converted to atheism the moment I heard this. As it was, I’d already become an atheist when I first met Miller in 1968.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“I doubt that I could love anyone who uses the phrase “reach out to,” or the equally odious “learning curve.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“But being working class wasn’t the real reason I feared analysis. It was my absolute horror of losing control. It’s why I’m scared stiff of recreational drugs and why I’m desperate to create my own environment. I’m terrified of losing control.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“As well as plowing my way through all but one of Dickens’s novels, I read most of Graham Greene, E. M. Forster, Orwell (preferring the essays to his novels), Evelyn Waugh, Maugham and D. H. Lawrence. I read tons of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser”
― Keith Mcnally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“As a character in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing says, “Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

“When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything

“Though Miller adored this scene, he focused on a more subtle one that he believed elevated the film to greatness. The sequence comes early on, when Lime’s melancholy lover, Anna, visits the apartment of the supposedly dead Lime. Sitting alone in his bedroom, she picks up a ringing telephone. While talking on the phone, she unconsciously opens a drawer, takes out two dice and instinctively rolls them. These unsensational few moments capture the intimate nature of Anna’s relationship with Lime that words would have labored to explain. It was a stroke of genius that I would never have recognized were it not for Miller.”
― Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir