Top 100 Alastair Quotes
#1. Alastair Moock is the second coming of John Prine.
Ellis Paul
#2. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#3. As his former student Alastair Fowler once remarked, "Lewis seemed always on the verge of hilarity -- between a chuckle and a roar.
Greg Cootsona
#4. Martin tangled his fingers fiercely in Alastair's hair
Jay Northcote
#5. I understand why the Tories will be gunning for Alastair Campbell because they fear his campaigning skills.
Peter Mandelson
#6. He watched Carl pouring coffee into a huge mug bearing a photo of a cute corgi, below which was the word Alastair.
K.C. Wells
#7. Wes is Wes," Alastair said. "One in every family. I love him, but I think of him as a sarcastic pet.
John Scalzi
#8. I always take an Alastair Sawday guide. I stayed in three or four places in India that they had recommended, and every one of them was wonderful.
Diana Quick
#9. Tony Blair has always said he will be judged by history. Now Alastair Campbell is history we await his judgment.
Rory Bremner
#11. I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment.
Alastair Reynolds
#12. Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.
Alastair Reynolds
#13. Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.
Alastair Reynolds
#14. I think we need to think beyond the issue of absolute risk.
Alastair Wood
#15. Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.
Alastair Reid
#16. And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.
Alastair Reynolds
#17. Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you - I should have seen that." The
Alastair Reynolds
#18. It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The
Alastair Reynolds
#20. In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.
Alastair Campbell
#21. I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.
Alastair Reynolds
#22. As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.
Alastair Reynolds
#23. You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
Alastair Reynolds
#24. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.
Alastair Reynolds
#25. I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.
Alastair Campbell
#26. My aunty says I'm the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I've definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.
Alastair Campbell
#29. It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.
Alastair Reynolds
#30. I am far more interested in being a beginner than in trying to become an expert. Life is difficult and complicated for everyone - but it's very, very short.
Alastair Humphreys
#31. Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.
Alastair Campbell
#32. Being a Scotsman, I am naturally opposed to water in its undiluted state.
Alastair Mackenzie
#33. Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick.
Alastair Reynolds
#34. I have a nightmare about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] killing each other. Not every month, but now and then. I also have a recurring dream about losing.
Alastair Campbell
#35. Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.
Alastair Reynolds
#36. Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences.
Alastair Reynolds
#37. We've created an impression that life is risk-free, and it's not.
Alastair Wood
#38. Tony's [Blair] convinced I'm going to find God. I do have spiritual moments, but I don't think it's God.
Alastair Campbell
#39. The junk food of political journalism ... all reshuffle stories are crap.
Alastair Campbell
#40. It wasn't always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or
Alastair Reynolds
#41. Even then, Vanderbilt was the premiere place for clinical pharmacology.
Alastair Wood
#42. I hold no candle for George Osborne whatsoever. He has no strategic skills, is a hopeless chancellor, has no idea how most people have to live and his policies are failing and hurting millions.
Alastair Campbell
#43. She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them.
Alastair Reynolds
#47. If human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.
Alastair Reynolds
#48. There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.
Alastair Reynolds
#49. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever unfolding mathematical structures - names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity.
Alastair Reynolds
#50. I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
Alastair Reynolds
#51. You just Sanisa in the death overs. He is simply the best in the world.
Alastair Cook
#52. A pro is someone who can do great work when he doesn't feel like it.
Alastair Cook
#53. Where no man has gone before - who said that - William Shakespeare?"
"I've no idea.
Alastair Reynolds
#54. Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?
Alastair Reynolds
#55. I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind.
Alastair Reynolds
#56. At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
Alastair Reynolds
#57. See the opportunities for adventures, not the constraints that get in the way.
Alastair Humphreys
#60. Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.
Alastair Reynolds
#61. He has played some outstanding innings in the past, and I've got no [sic] confidence whatsoever that he'll come back and play very well in the near future.
Andrew Strauss
#62. Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.
Alastair Reynolds
#63. I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.
Alastair Reynolds
#64. What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that's sad.
Alastair Campbell
#65. Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.
Alastair Reynolds
#66. She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.
Alastair Reynolds
#68. Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.
Alastair Reynolds
#69. You look older, son." "Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.
Alastair Reynolds
#70. For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.
Alastair Reynolds
#71. It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.
Alastair Reynolds
#73. The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.
Alastair Reynolds
#74. Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.
Alastair Reynolds
#75. Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.
Alastair Reynolds
#76. Only an evolutionary eyeblink separated Kanu from the savannah, and that was just as true for the Risen. Their minds might be fixed on the stars, but their bodies were only a footstep from the dust and heat of Amboseli.
Alastair Reynolds
#77. That,' Peregrine said, 'is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.
Alastair Reynolds
#78. Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller.
Alastair Reynolds
#79. Of course. Life would be tough for a repo man in the starship business. * * * The
Alastair Mayer
#80. You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot.
Alastair Reynolds
#81. Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.
Alastair Reynolds
#82. Sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and myself would go to Tony [Blair] and ask him if he was absolutely sure about this or that. That was our job. But ultimately it was his decision.
Alastair Campbell
#83. Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job.
Alastair Campbell
#85. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.
Alastair Reid
#86. They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible.
Alastair Reynolds
#87. There was a moment of absolute cosmic cold, as if a billion tiny doors had opened in every cell of his body, letting in the draught of creation.
Alastair Reynolds
#88. One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.
Alastair Reynolds
#89. I don't know who started this thing about being perfect but the sooner we ditch that idea the happier we all will be!
Alastair Arnott
#90. We should have brought a torch," he was saying. "We have been to Saturn and back and we didn't bring a torch.
Alastair Reynolds
#91. Adventure is just about doing something you've never done - doing it with enthusiasm and curiosity: doing something difficult with passion.
Alastair Humphreys
#92. Sluka shook her head. We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
#93. You're confident he'll have found him, then?"
"Well, no. I didn't sat that."
"If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.
Alastair Reynolds
#94. Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.
Alastair Reynolds
#95. But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won't be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You'll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?
Alastair Reynolds
#96. We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He
Alastair Reynolds
#97. None of us is a monster, Chiku. We're all just trying to make the best of our singular natures.
Alastair Reynolds
#98. I am disappointed to find myself accused in some papers of supplying the offending sweets, particularly as I am a fruit pastille man.
Alastair Cook
#99. I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege.
Alastair Campbell
#100. I think I might have a glass of champagne, if there is any in Nagpur, and just enjoy the moment.
Alastair Cook
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