Christopher Frayling > Quotes

“Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.”
― Christopher Frayling

“The popular visual imagery of China, as The Times correspondent suggested, came from pantomime and music hall in pre-cinema days; together with comics, press and book illustrations. Reminiscences by visitors to China sometimes noted that this was how they actually saw Peking when first they arrived. Then they discovered that the pantomimes were really about England in fancy dress.”
― Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia: Dr. Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia

“At this point, [Tuco and Pablo] start scrapping like children, while Blondie looks secretly on. 'Please forgive me, brother', says the thoroughly ashamed Padre Ramirez. Tuco walks out, without turning back, then boastfully tells Blondie: 'My brother, he's crazy about me... even a tramp like me. No matter what happens, there'll always be a bowl of soup'. Blondie replies: 'Well, after a meal, there's nothing like a good cigar'. Tuco wipes away his tears and proceeds to eat the cigar, a broad grin returning to his face.”
― Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death

“Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing back in September 1982, had encountered a similar problem: the interpreter was heard to call her ‘The Quite Honourable Margaret Thatcher’. On the other hand, she took some persuading to stop using the word ‘Chinamen’.”
― Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia: Dr. Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia

“Having failed the Civil Service entrance examinations, he had become – she recalled – a clerk at the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on 31 Lombard Street, at the age of eighteen – one of his ‘fellow employees’ there had been the young P. G. Wodehouse”
― Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia: Dr. Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia

“he always stressed that ‘one could go down from floor to floor far below street level and find … yellow warrens’. A literally underground culture, already a journalistic cliché.”
― Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia: Dr. Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia

“Take Doris Day. There is a vision of America in her films, which is totalitarian and quasi-Soviet! A world without conflict, Abel without Cain. While America itself, on the other hand, like every other society is really about conflict and truth competing with untruth . . . I wanted to show the cruelty of that nation, I was bored stiff with all those grinning white teeth. Hygiene and optimism are the woodworms which destroy American wood. It is a great shame if “America” is always to be left to the Americans.”
― Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death