Hoggart Quotes

#1. My father, Simon Hoggart, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2010. By this point, it had spread to his spleen and metastasised in his lungs and so was pronounced terminal.

Amy Hoggart

#2. I normally feel relief that I didn't die onstage or forget all my lines. Then I start remembering that I have to do it again sometime, and it'll probably not go as well.

Amy Hoggart

#3. A British lawyer would like to think of himself as part of that mysterious entity called The Law; an American lawyer would like a swimming pool and two houses.

Simon Hoggart

#4. I do love live performing, but I'm not a stand-up naturally, and I don't like the lifestyle of working just in the evenings at clubs and stuff - not a natural gig-er.

Amy Hoggart

#5. We all have our opinions. But I suspect that writers are actually less worth heeding, because they regard themselves as so uniquely important, so culturally sensitive.

Simon Hoggart

#6. Most successful American politicians look well-fed on endorsements, campaign contributions and chicken dinners.

Simon Hoggart

#7. Reagan is the only man to take the presidency as a part-time job, a means of filling up the otherwise empty hours of retirement.

Simon Hoggart

#8. When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold now.

Simon Hoggart

#9. It's kind of a camaraderie in the comedy community, people are kind of proud of how badly they go down sometimes, and it's quite nice to join in with that.

Amy Hoggart

#10. When you actually see Barack Obama, it's startling how slight he is and how young he looks.

Simon Hoggart

#11. Dad's cancer experience included periods of relatively good health as well as bouts of hospitalisation as he coursed his way through a variety of different chemotherapy treatments.

Amy Hoggart

#12. Reagan was a flesh and blood version of any other mute national emblem, say the Statue of Liberty. Everyone knows what she represents, but no one would dream of asking her opinion.

Simon Hoggart

#13. Switzerland still has a huge share of the watch market, all advertised at the airport on illuminated hoardings. Gosh, they are ugly.

Simon Hoggart

#14. I've served on five different juries, and many of them were bonkers in their own way.

Simon Hoggart

#15. When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

Simon Hoggart

#16. The Chinese do make vast quantities of wine for home consumption, but you wouldn't want to drink it yourself.

Simon Hoggart

#17. Until now their line has been that the Tories are incapable of doing anything about poverty, and aren't interested in doing it in the first place. By contrast, Labour says, we are also incapable of doing anything about poverty, but would dearly love to do something. If we knew what.

Simon Hoggart

#18. I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.

Simon Hoggart

#19. What puzzles me is the way that some of the smaller, unknown chateaux imagine that because Chinese millionaires pay ludicrous sums for the great names, they can overcharge for their own inferior fluids. There is no trickledown effect in wine prices.

Simon Hoggart

#20. She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood.

Simon Hoggart

#21. What has always puzzled me is the flexibility of God's word. For instance, Catholics can now eat meat on Fridays. And limbo has been abolished. How does this work? Who tells them?

Simon Hoggart

#22. I'm more influenced by characters than standups. I love strong, comic women because it's so hard, and I have so much respect for anyone who can do it. I'm a big fan of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and people like that.

Amy Hoggart

#23. I think Tony Blair has to come down on one side or the other. You can't be a half-hearted supporter of the possible attack on Iraq. You're either with George Bush or you're against him.

Simon Hoggart

#24. Denis Healey refused to contribute an article to the 'Guardian' about his intentions, and was punished by the electorate - and then all Labour MPs - for his presumption in assuming they already knew everything about him. He became famously the best prime minister we never had. Perhaps.

Simon Hoggart

#25. There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama's attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

Simon Hoggart

#26. In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Simon Hoggart

#27. I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable.

Simon Hoggart

#28. If you like quick put-downs and aggressive interactions with the audience, you will probably not enjoy the rambles of an unusual character act making jokes about cats for an hour.

Amy Hoggart

#29. I'm often amazed at the way politicians, who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks, are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything.

Simon Hoggart

#30. Poor Harper Seven Beckham, having to live with that name all her life. It's the Boy Named Sue syndrome; at the very least it will toughen her up.

Simon Hoggart

#31. Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you've had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party.

Simon Hoggart

#32. I've never been heckled. I think because I look too small and vulnerable. Sometimes I look out into the audience and see pity in their eyes, so I guess those people may be the ones who would shout something out if they didn't feel so sorry for me.

Amy Hoggart

#33. I've been intrigued by 'Le Monde' ever since work took me to Paris once, and I noted that on a day when there was some huge worldwide story, the paper led its front page on some cabinet changes in Turkey. It implied a magnificent disdain for the quotidian folderol of mere news.

Simon Hoggart

#34. Remember how Margaret Thatcher came to believe that abroad was more important than at home? Didn't do her much good.

Simon Hoggart

#35. My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.

Simon Hoggart

#36. All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

Simon Hoggart

#37. I was trying to be a clinical psychologist for years. But I kept getting stuck in comedy.

Amy Hoggart

#38. The nanny seemed to be extinct until 1975, when, like the coelacanth, she suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.

Simon Hoggart

#39. Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House.

Simon Hoggart

#40. Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.

Simon Hoggart

#41. They're called Virgin Trains because they don't go all the way.

Simon Hoggart

#42. The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.

Simon Hoggart

#43. Some government expenditure actually makes a profit. Our theatre leads the world. Loads of tourists must be attracted by the fact that you could spend a week in London doing nothing but visit superb museums and galleries, free.

Simon Hoggart

#44. Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don't take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca.

Simon Hoggart

#45. It's sad that the BBC is toning down Dennis the Menace for a cartoon series. He is losing his weapons, catapult and peashooter, will no longer pick on Walter the Softy, and his ferocious grimace is to be replaced by a charming, boyish smile.

Simon Hoggart

#46. Peter Mandelson is the only man I know who can skulk in broad daylight.

Simon Hoggart

#47. If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

Simon Hoggart

#48. The Tory party is like a rugby union match in which all 30 players are wearing the same strip. They're not sure who they are grabbing round the knees, but they're having a lot of fun doing it.

Simon Hoggart

#49. Canada is not so much a country as a clothesline nearly 4,000 miles long. St John's in Newfoundland is closer to Milan, Italy than to Vancouver.

Simon Hoggart

#50. The thing with cancer is that it's usually the chemo rather than the disease itself that makes the patient feel so ill, particularly at the start.

Amy Hoggart

#51. Seeing John Major govern the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands try to make balloon animals.

Simon Hoggart

#52. While it is entirely untrue that Canadians lack a sense of humour, the funniest ones tend to head south: Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox.

Simon Hoggart

#53. Even I would find a book about my life pretty dull.

Simon Hoggart

#54. By and large, I think that comics work seriously hard. Many have other jobs as well, plus you never really switch off, so you're always working.

Amy Hoggart

#55. America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they'd be smaller then these.

Simon Hoggart

#56. To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn't confessed was a minor detail.

Simon Hoggart

#57. Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.

Simon Hoggart

#58. British diplomats who worked in Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis are deeply upset by Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning film 'Argo,' which suggests they refused shelter to the group who managed to get out of the U.S. embassy.

Simon Hoggart

#59. A married vicar is likely to regard his vocation as a job - a tough and ill-paid one, to be sure - but a priest is seen as a pillar of the community, answerable only to his parishioners and his God, rather than to a wife and children.

Simon Hoggart

#60. 'Sir' Richard Branson may be the Julian Assange of British business, in that both believe the world revolves around them. Hence Branson's decision to set up an air service between Manchester and London, above the route of the train line that's been taken from him.

Simon Hoggart

#61. One of the pleasures of staying with friends is that you get to browse their shelves. I always arrive with a book, but I almost never read it. It would be like sitting at their dinner table and opening a packet of sandwiches.

Simon Hoggart

#62. During my own gap year, I learned an invaluable lesson - that I was a lousy teacher. Even though the children I 'taught,' in upcountry Uganda, were desperate for qualifications, they largely ignored me. Until, that is, I realised that they wanted to hear about other young persons around the world.

Simon Hoggart

#63. In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.

Simon Hoggart