Michael Frayn Quotes

#1. The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

Michael Frayn

#2. If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

Michael Frayn

#3. For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him.

Michael Frayn

#4. You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success, then that's your bad luck.

Michael Frayn

#5. I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Michael Frayn

#6. And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world.

Michael Frayn

#7. To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.

Michael Frayn

#8. Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.

Michael Frayn

#9. Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

Michael Frayn

#10. Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.

Michael Frayn

#11. A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.

Michael Frayn

#12. It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

Michael Frayn

#13. But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.

Michael Frayn

#14. Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?

Michael Frayn

#15. Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities ...
Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.

Michael Frayn

#16. He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.

Michael Frayn

#17. Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums

Michael Frayn

#18. I haven't come to the theater to hear about other people's probelms. I've come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again.

Michael Frayn

#19. No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.

Michael Frayn

#20. For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

Michael Frayn

#21. A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child's hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult's hand and imagination to grasp.

Michael Frayn

#22. No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here ... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am.

Michael Frayn

#23. You've got ten fingers,' said Morris. 'Why not stick them in ten pies?

Michael Frayn

#24. ..deceivers must expect to be deceived.

Michael Frayn

#25. I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

Michael Frayn

#26. When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

Michael Frayn

#27. Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.

Michael Frayn

#28. Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water

Michael Frayn

#29. You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

Michael Frayn

#30. Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not.

Michael Frayn

#31. Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door ...

Michael Frayn