Gaisford Prize Quotes

#1. Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons

#2. When you're insecure about your technique, you close yourself off. Your shoulders tighten. The first thing, you should open your body and sing. Be happy. Sing real vowels, real Italian vowels. When you're learning a good way to sing technically, you find it's very easy to sing well.

Marcello Giordani

#3. There are a lot of smart honest, progressive people who I think can be good presidents.

Bernie Sanders

#4. Truly, only acting without thought of one's life is superior to valuing one's life.

Laozi

#5. The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring
that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#6. Women without men are usually nervous ... The important thing is to have a man, even if you just like him. Pleasing him, you will please yourself.

Sheilah Graham Westbrook

#7. And why not death rather than living torment? To die is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her Is self from self: a deadly banishment!

William Shakespeare

#8. If you've only seen a dead body in a casket at a funeral, then you've never seen a real dead body. Believe me, I know, because recently I saw my first real dead body.

Jules Cassard

#9. Brilliant. A very funny and concise explanation of why we men are as we are. If you are male, you should read it and then make your partner read it, so they will no longer hate you but pity you instead.

Harry Enfield

#10. Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him. He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he not only handpicked the man most likely to finish him, he handed him uniquely deadly weapons!

J.K. Rowling

#11. The sun spread on the horizon, bleeding colour like a broken yolk.

Christine Piper

#12. To me some of the funniest movies would be probably categorized in the dramatic genre, and likewise some of the most dramatic films, or films that have the most dramatic moments, are in comedies.

Paul Rudd

#13. I fucking hated pity. It was a wasted emotion.

Ilsa Madden-Mills

#14. OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?

David Hockney