Toby Young Quotes

#1. The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

Saul Bellow

#2. Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds: We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.

Sharon Salzberg

#3. Boat.
Toby.
1pm.
Shit!

C.J. Duggan

#4. It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities.

Rudolf Hiferding

#5. In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

Toby Young

#6. intrigues of love are unfolding as they do among the young, and as they do as well among the snails on the lettuce and the shiny green beetles that plague the kale. Murmurings, the shrug of a shoulder, the step forward, the step back. Toby

Margaret Atwood

#7. My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.

Toby Young

#8. America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.

Toby Young

#9. I wouldn't describe myself as a master of anything.

Toby Young

#10. A 'T' for Tess, a 'T' for Toby.

C.J. Duggan

#11. If Star Wars had been released in the late '60s, or late '80s, or late '90s, adjusting for technology, it fits spectacularly well.

Cass Sunstein

#12. The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

Joseph Campbell

#13. The moment I'm perceived to be even a tiny bit successful, my career will go down the pan.

Toby Young

#14. If anything bad happens, the media will leap on it. We're under a huge obligation to be successful.

Toby Young

#15. I miss being fawned over by restaurateurs and chefs.

Toby Young

#16. Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first.

Toby Young

#17. My mom taught us the Serenity Prayer at a young age.

Toby Keith

#18. I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering, but I realized I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work.

Toby Young

#19. There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

Toby Young

#20. I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

Toby Young

#21. You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone's laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they're all laughing at you?

Toby Young

#22. Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

Wally Lamb

#23. People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan.

Toby Young

#24. I expect that in 40 years' time I'll be writing political tomes and working for an organisation like Oxfam.

Toby Young

#25. 'Top Chef' is a very smooth-running machine. All the people working there are incredibly professional and absolutely at the top of their game.

Toby Young

#26. Tess, will you marry me?" Toby laughed.

C.J. Duggan

#27. I swear, I didn't really go in thinking, 'I'll be the Simon Cowell' of 'Top Chef.' I was just used to being a judge on British food shows where people are much more outspoken and rather rude. That's the culture over here.

Toby Young

#28. Oddly, I do have a problem with authority. I find it very difficult to knuckle down and follow rules. Which are the classic symptoms of someone who has a troubled relationship with their father. And yet, I never had a problem with my father.

Toby Young

#29. A dementia-friendly society is not yet in reach.

Meryl Comer

#30. When you knock off work tonight, go looking for Toby, because, trust me, he will be looking for you.

C.J. Duggan

#31. I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.

Toby Young

#32. I was once hired to write a column for 'The Guardian' and then got fired before I'd submitted my first one. That was unusual. Most newspapers wait until I've written at least one piece for them before firing me.

Toby Young

#33. I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

Toby Young

#34. I think I've been wishing for celebrity for so long that I've got used to being someone who's petitioning the establishment for acceptance ... my whole schtick, my whole identity, is so wrapped up in being a petitioner that I don't really know how to react now that petition has been granted.

Toby Young