Jeremy Clarkson Quotes

Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you.

How hard can it be?

No, no, no. There's no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It's cheap and nasty & expensive and cheerful.

Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary… that’s what gets you.

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3).

I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge, when times is pressing and one needs to make a snap judgment, whether or not some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously, it’s not 100% infallible but by and large it definitely points you in the right direction and it's asking this question; are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it's letting the side down? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating retarded, time-wasting, bullshit? Is this making Jeremy Clarkson feel insecure? Almost always the answer is no. The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way, they are just getting on with stuff.

Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

Why is the forecast so bland? Why instead of 'stormy' don't they just say the sea's 'a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness'?

Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.

We are going to have to stop penalising people for making that most human of gestures- mistake

it’d be like choosing between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan in a bare-knuckle death match. There ought to be a way both could lose.

Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.

.. international hand of freindship. A cigarette

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself. When I was in the middle of 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy - which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist - you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn't have noticed.

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.

[A Bugatti Veyron is] quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created....At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I’ve ever said about any other car obsolete. It’s rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a bloody nose.

I therefore have to use The Force. And weirdly, this doesn't work very well. I don't understand why, because on the last census, I put my religion down as Jedi Knight...

…it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.

Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.

Lego, however, is always opened and then left lying around so adults have something to tread on when they are prowling around around the house at two in the morning, in bare feet, looking for the source of a noise.

These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising. Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’ ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.

Speed has never killed anyone - suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you.

Recently, I spent eight days in a car with my co-host from Top Gear James May, who has a notoriously flatulent bottom. But because he was living on army rations the interior was always pine fresh and lemon zesty.

Mother, who had never missed a chance to fulminate against the evils of our time including privatisation, Jeremy Clarkson, and pay-day loans.

No really. If you only have seven years left, that means the Reaper will be dropping round for tea and buns in about 61,000 hours from now. You therefore shouldn’t be wasting time by pootling to the garden centre at walking pace. So come on, grandad. The clock’s ticking. Pedal to the metal. Or you’ll be in your flowerbed before the plants you bought.

Let's be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It's a disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

Hence, once the director calls cut on a take, May will often roar, ‘Get me pussy,’ and Munn will appear with the furiously mewing orb of animals. This is not to be mistaken for anything else. He’s not Donald Trump.

I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it here again, now. Nothing brilliant has ever resulted from a meeting.

But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big.

I am aware, of course, that many men do hate the sight of their wife and children. Doctors even have a name for these people: 'anglers'.

I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then… and then what? By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again. I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.

and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say ‘vanquish’.

Do they think that, if left to our own devices, we’d all park on zebra crossings for a year? If they do, it means they don’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, then the relationship has broken down and it’s time for some civil unrest.

Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that's hard to explain.

Flirting is the oil that lubricates the engine of ingenuity and wit

The new MX-5 is like the new Ford Mondeo and the Subaru Legacy Outback. It is one of those cars that's absolutely brilliant ... and nobody buys it. You never see one on the road.

Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.

In the olden days it was easy to make a television work.You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down.

I don’t always want to see and be seen at the best parties, because I’ve done that for too many years. I want something real and true.” I pause and shoot him a sideways look. “I want a real partner, not a boyfriend who brings home a twenty two year old twink to make up a threesome for my birthday present.” “What the fuck?” I look at him and start laughing helplessly. “I just wanted the latest Jeremy Clarkson biography.

Blue jeans are perhaps the most ubiquitous carrier of working-man symbolism. Presently I struggle with denim. It will be a while before the aroma of Jeremy Clarkson and a host of ageing ‘rebels’ has dissipated from the artefact.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

In Italy, you sometimes get the impression they'd be happier to lose the Ppe than lose their right to drive like maniacs.

Porsche made more money last year from selling almost 190,000 cars than its parent company, Volkswagen, made from selling more than 4.5 million.

In Conisborough there’s no Hoxton Square to bring a bit of light relief. It’s just mile after mile of broken windows and the bloody Earth Centre.

In England on a hot day, women are happy to walk around with their bra straps showing. In Paris, they don't shave their armpits. And you just can't mention Germany and style in the same book, let alone the same sentence. It's the same story in America too, where the Farrah Fawcett haido of 1975 still reigns supreme. In Italy, even the policemenists look like they've just come off a catwalk. One I found, standing on a rostrum in the middle of a Roman square, was immaculate, as was his routine. Each wave of the hand, each toot of the whistle and each twist of the body was Pans People perfect. Never mind that the traffic was completely ignoring him, he looked good, and that's what mattered. Looking good in Italy is even more important than looking where you're going.

Honest to God, the Qubo is so slow that if you climbed into one this morning in Hunstanton and attempted to drive south as fast as possible, coastal erosion would swallow you up by Wednesday evening.

More importantly, if you can’t enjoy a glass of wine on a lovely sunny day then you have removed one of the tent poles of civilization from your life. You have become no better than a cow, or a rabbit.

When I was in the middle of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy – which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist – you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t have noticed. Which

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings.

Everything I have ever bought is in my car. People say it’s a skip and disgusting, and refuse to get in there. That’s one advantage. Another is that last week, I needed a headache pill and it was simply a case of rummaging under the seat until I found one. Because it’s so full of junk, I always have everything I could conceivably need. A Biro, a refreshing drink, lots of loose change, all sorts of maps, an iron lung, and so on. I kid you not. There’s even a wetsuit in there.

I’ve noticed that ‘news’ is not what’s happened. It’s what’s happened on camera. If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it’s not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it’s not news. But if it’s a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded. I find myself wondering if last week’s Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn’t been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.

If I may be permitted to liken America to the human body, then I think it is fair to say that California is its face, New York is its brain and Texas is its heart. If you wanna know what makes America tick, get your ten-gallon hat on, and get yourself to Texas.

Colin Chapman summed up his philosophy thus: 'Simplify and add lightness.' Mind you, he also said, 'You would never catch me driving a race car that I have built.' Which probably explains why Lotus came to be known as an acronym for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.

would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

I look at everyone in their Honda CR-Vs and their BMW X3s and their Audi Q3s and I think, Are you all mad? An ordinary estate or hatchback costs less to buy and less to run and is nicer to drive, more comfortable and just as practical. But it doesn’t take up so much bloody space.

Flying means boredom. Next time you're going away, just drive. You can leave when you want. You don't have to sit next to a stranger. You can listen to all sorts of loud music without headphones and look at things out of the window that aren't just clouds. Driving is sensible alternative to flying.

There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arm.

Then there’s the biggest problem of them all – the problem of being in an Audi TT when you are not called Angela. I do not know why it can be driven by only people named Angela, but that’s a fact and there’s nothing we can do about it. If you have a TT and you aren’t called Angela, you have the wrong car.

It won’t be a volcano that ends man’s existence on this planet. It’ll be the no-win no-fee lawyers. They are the ones who brought Europe to a halt last week. They are the ones who made a simple trip from Berlin to London into a five-country, all-day hammer blow on your licence fee. They are the ones who must be stopped.

The next day I called my neighbouring farmers to say I was going to have a coronary, and they all had the same piece of advice. I had to accept whatever happens, because that’s farming. They also said I had to be patient, which is not possible. I can’t be patient. It’s not in my DNA. It’s a bit like telling Nicholas Witchell he has to be a Moroccan cage fighter.

I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it’s flying; the next it’s tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face.

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.

Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped. Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can ‘abandon ship’ even when you’re in space.

there’s never been a safer time to go for a ride. Sadly, though, there’s a problem. You see, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald’s, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It’s all fascism. Fascism, d’you hear? From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen.

(on iPhone) the battery is fine. It lasts for four days. Though this might have something to do with the fact that I'm a man, and therefore only think to use a phone when I'm on a cliff, clinging to a branch, in a howling gale. And only then as a last resort.

...sips fuel like a mouse sipping sherry from a hypodermic needle.

А ще є пазли, і мені довелося якось пояснювати одному грекові, в чому суть цієї забави. "Часом треба витратити зо два тижні, щоби скласти всі ці шматочки в картинку. — І що далі? —Ну, а далі розбираєте ту картинку на шматочки і ховаєте їх до коробки". Я не часто співчуваю грекам, але то був якраз один із тих рідкісних випадків. Те саме, до речі, великою мірою і з кросвордами. Якби вчені зуміли спрямувати в корисне русло ту розумову енергію, з якою люди щодня ламають собі голову над запитаннями на кшталт "прізвище відмомого російського любителя бананів, прочитане задом наперед", то вже давно знайшли би ліки від раку. Кросворди, як і пазли та крикет, — насправді не ігри. Це просто засоби, які допомагають збавляти час. А тому вони не зовсім збігаються з тим напрямком, у якому розвивається сучасний світ. Можна мріяти про повільне, розмірене життя, про те, щоби проводити дві години за обіднім столом, а потому до самого світанку жувати сир, але дійсність така, що нас мало нагла кров не заливає, коли світлофор надто довго не перемикається на зелене чи якщо двері ліфта не відчиняються, щойно ми натиснемо кнопку.

reaching for the ‘Yes,

Yes, it’s true, you can only be as happy as your least happy child and they are a constant font of worry and stress.

On top of the dashboard are three dials in a raised binnacle. They tell you nothing you need to know but they look good. They look sporty. They tell you that you are a man in a hurry, but here's hoping you aren't, because this is not a fast car.

There are many models in the current range, and if you ask a 911 enthusiast to talk you through the subtle differences between each, you can be sure that by the end of the conversation one of you will be dead.

Let’s not forget what happened when Morgan Piers went to America and lectured them on gun ownership. They put a flea in his ear and sent him packing, and now he has to earn a living from behind a veil of orange makeup on breakfast TV. If Ms Meghan doesn’t learn a lesson from that sorry tale, she may well end up in exactly the same boat.

A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, a left-wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anything else, a story.

I must say, at this juncture, that I don’t like fighting. I prefer passive resistance and, if that doesn’t work, active fleeing.

The rules of war, then, have always changed as a reaction to the conflict that’s just been fought.

Only once was this not an option. A girlfriend had been pinned against the wall by a wiry, tattooed man whose speech was slurred by a combination of drink and being from Glasgow.

I tapped the drunken Scotsman on the shoulder and said, as politely as possible: ‘Excuse me.’ He whirled round, his eyes full of fire and his hands balled into steel-hard fists. But the blow never came. ‘Christ, you’re a big bastard,’ he said, and ran off. It was the proudest moment of my life.

I can’t imagine that I would be terribly happy living in Afghanistan, either, though I dare say there is some satisfaction in going to bed thinking: ‘Well, at least I wasn’t shot today.

And I’m not sure I would like it in Brazil, either, having to walk around in a thong to demonstrate that I had nothing about my person worth stealing.

Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fish when he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that he had no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket. Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the weather.

Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

Did I mention the dolphin? As a unique selling point the boys in Tahiti had caught themselves a big grey beasty which spent all day on its back, in a lagoon, being pawed by overweight American women with preposterous plastic tits and unwise G-string bikini bottoms. ‘Would you like to see his penis?’ asked the man in a skirt when I climbed into the water. No. What I’d like to do is spear you through the heart with a harpoon and let the miserable thing have a taste of freedom.

I have no idea how millennials are getting so fat. Perhaps it’s because, as we’ve learnt, they prefer lunching via telephone to getting off their arses and going to an actual restaurant. But I think the real problem is that they are a very miserable generation who believe that Theresa May set the Grenfell Tower alight by herself and that the country would be better if it had a man called Stormzy in the hot seat. They are steered through life by campaigning websites, leftie tweets and inspirational hashtags, and as a result see inequality and injustice all around them. Especially on Instagram, where everyone else is always on holiday. And has a better-looking dog.

Some well-known acronyms simply don’t work at all. Pin number, for example. Because what you’re actually saying is ‘personal information number number’. It’s the same with those who refer to the HIV virus. Or an ATM machine. Or an LCD display. Or an ISDN network. Then you have abbreviations that are longer to use than the actual words. Worldwide web, for instance, is three syllables, whereas WWW is nine. And why say: ‘Have you RSVPed?’ when you mean ‘Have you replied?’?

The problem is that social media, which is seen as the pulse of the nation, is actually nothing of the sort. It’s the pulse of the young and the idealistic.

But here too there’s a problem – the faster you go, the more time slows down. This is a scientific fact. I spend my life driving quickly, which is why I have a 1970s haircut.

We waste an enormous amount of time making decisions based entirely on this fanciful notion that we like alternatives.

Stick to breathing. It’s the only thing you’re any good at.

My sister once asked why it always feels, in any car, as if you’re sitting inside a man’s wash bag, and she has a point. They’re normally black and dark and enlivened only by some red stripes.

shop assistants who think they can sing

Many think the steering wheel is nothing more than a handy place to rest a laptop. Going round a corner at more than 2mph would cause your bucket of coffee to fall over. So why bother?

Sceeeeeeeeeeeeee’,

You’ll be flying along when it will suddenly ‘burp’, ejecting air not from the back but from the front. This is bad news, because all of a sudden you have full thrust from one side of the plane and full drag from the other. The result is a spin, and the result of that is a quiet and undignified end for the two men on board. Quiet because the crash won’t be reported – how can a plane crash if it officially ‘doesn’t exist’? – and undignified because when you hit the ground in an SR-71 they don’t bury the remains so much as hose them into the nearest drain.

iron ore

At this time of year many people decide that they should go on a Christmas-shopping trip to New York.

IF THE MCLAREN P1 ISN’T FASTER THAN THOSE OTHER TWO CARS YOU CAN KNOCK MY HOUSE DOWN … OH BUGGER’ – JEREMY CLARKSON

The Italians are responsible for Fiat, Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, De Tomaso, Lamborghini, Maserati and Pagani. It wouldn’t seem so unfair if they weren’t also really good at food, art and fashion. Selfish. That’s what it is, it’s selfish.

change the

assassin took his gun out of his crutch.