Alan Coren Quotes

#1. The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.

Alan Coren

#2. Being a personality is not the same thing as having a personality.

Alan Coren

#3. 10.30 Newsnight: What Are The Chances Of World War Three Breaking Out After You Have Gone To Bed?

Alan Coren

#4. Remember: Enjoy your life today, because yesterday has gone and tomorrow may never come.

Alan Coren

#5. All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.

Alan Coren

#6. Having lost the last war, they are currently enjoying a Wirtschaftswunder , which can be briefly translated as The best way to own a Mercedes is to build one.

Alan Coren

#7. A humorist tells himself every morning, "I hope it's going to be a rough day." When things are going well, it's much harder to make the right jokes.

Alan Coren

#8. There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?

Alan Coren

#9. Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Alan Coren

#10. How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

Walt Whitman

#11. Strictly speaking, the land does not exist; it is merely dehydrated sea.

Alan Coren

#12. Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair.

David Novak

#13. You need space to try things and create. It takes a long time to recalibrate if you let people pull at you all the time. A lot of stress comes from reacting to stuff. You have to keep a certain guard [up], if you're a creative person.

Pete Cashmore

#14. Disneyworld ... is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

Alan Coren

#15. Enjoy your life today because yesterday had gone and tomorrow may never come

Alan Coren

#16. Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.

Alan Coren

#17. To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

Alan Coren

#18. Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

Alan Coren

#19. The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

Alan Coren

#20. Ethnically, the Germans are Teutonic ... being made up of Vandals, Gepidae, and Goths, all of whom emigrated - south from Sweden in about 500 BC; why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral.

Alan Coren

#21. There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector

Augustine Birrell

#22. Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren't called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)

Alan Coren

#23. I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

Kevin Sessums

#24. There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

Kevin Spacey

#25. I wonder sometimes if manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Alan Coren

#26. The word "souvenir" has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

Alan Coren

#27. Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.

Alan Coren

#28. As a woman, a lot of stories haven't been told and we've got a lot of catching up to do.

Lili Taylor