Kyril Bonfiglioli Quotes

It was still only nine o'clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.

I never think of policemen's wives; their beauty maddens me like wine.

Bed is the only place for protracted telephoning. It is also execellently suited to reading, sleeping and listening to canaries. It is not a good place for sex: sex should take place in armchairs, or in bathrooms, or on lawns which have been brushed but not too recently mown, or on sandy beaches if you happen to have been circumcised. If you are too tired to have intercourse except in bed you are probably too tired anyway and should be husbanding your strength.

I very carefully levered up an eyelid and shut it again fast. A merciless sunbeam had squirted straight in, making my brain bleed.

There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words.

she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same price.

My flight was announced by Donald Duck noises from a loudspeaker; I arose and shuffled off towards the statistical improbability of dying in an airplane crash. Personally, the thought of such a death appalls me little – what civilized man would not rather die like Icarus than be mangled to death on a Motorway by a Ford Popular?

How sharper than a serpent's tooth is an awakening without tea!

When depressed, go and find someone to salute you.

toward the end she was she was wearing nothing but seven beads, four of them sweat

We know that death is the only end of art. A chap who has gone to all the trouble of strangling his wife is entitled to his moment of splendour on the gallows – it is a crime to make him sew mailbags like a common thief.

I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’ ‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.

Have you ever been a member of the Communist or Anarchist parties, Mr Mortdecai?’ ‘Good Lord no!’ I cried gaily, ‘filthy capitalist, me. Grind the workers’ faces, I say.’ ‘When you were at school?’ he prompted gently. ‘Oh. Well, yes, I think I did take the Red side in the debating society at school once or twice. But in the Lower Sixth we all got either religion or Communism – it goes with acne you know. Vanishes as soon as you have proper sexual intercourse.

Karl Popper urges us to be constantly on our guard against the fashionable disease of our time: the assumption that things cannot be taken at their face value, that an apparent syllogism must be the rationale of an irrational motive, that a human avowal must conceal some self-seeking baseness. (Freud assures us that Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a homosexual symbol, his upward-pointing index finger seeking to penetrate the fundament of the universe; art historians know that it is a centuries-old cliché of Christian iconography.)

Sleep is not, with me, a mere switching off: it is a very positive pleasure to be supped and savoured with expertise. It was a good night; sleep pampered me like a familiar, salty mistress who yet always has a new delight with which to surprise her jaded lover.

Some of my best friends are women,' I snapped, 'though I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to marry one of them.

At HQ, meantime, the Dispatcher of Inspectors is cackling hatefully as he cuddles his Bradshaw's Railway Guide, for the train the inspectors will catch at Victoria has a restaurant car but it is too late for what British Rail jestingly calls "breakfast" and too early for a life-giving drink. Heh, heh! At Eastbourne, they [the bank inspectors] stamp into the bank's Market Street branch, flourishing many a dread credential and reciting an Ogden Nash-like poem which goes after this fashion: Keys, Please. Then they glance swiftly around to observe which cashier has gone green about the gills, which teller is slipping his pocket-money back into the petty-cash box and feeding the racing pages of the Daily Mirror into the shredding machine, which assistant manager is sidling out in the general direction of Gatwick Airport.

Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never.

You see, we anti-feminists don’t dislike women in the least; we prize, cherish, and pity them. We are compassionate. Goodness, to think of the poor wretches having to waddle through life with all those absurd fatty appendages sticking out of them; to have all the useful part of their lives made miserable by the triple plague of constipation, menstruation and parturition; worst of all, to have to cope with these handicaps with only a kind of fuzzy half-brain – a pretty head randomly filled, like a tiddly-winks cup, with brightly-coloured scraps of rubbish – why, it wrings the very heart with pity. You know how your dog sometimes gazes anguishedly at you, its almost human eyes yearning to understand, longing to communicate? You remember how often you have felt that it was on the very brink of breaking through the barrier and joining you? I think that’s why you and I are so kind to women, bless ’em.

she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same

that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.

Jock byl vmžiku u mne a vnutil mi do ztuhlých prstů jednu ze svých proslulých brandy se sodou. (Tajemství proslulých Jockových brandy se sodou spočívá v tom, že je dělá bez sody; je to jednoduchý trik, který si každý snadno osvojí.)

Stiskl jsem zvonek, a když se objevil Jock, požádal jsem ho o kostku. Odpověděl, že nic takového doma nemáme a už nemá smysl pro nějakou posílat, protože každý slušný prodavač kostek už stáhl roletu a v zavřeném krámě se mucká s manželkou. A tak byla ta kostka, do níž jsem zestručnil a zaobalil svou odpověď v podobě NE, ryze abstraktní.

Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore.

(Pouting is one of those dying arts; Mrs Spon can do it, so can the boy who creates my shirts, but it’s almost as rare nowadays as tittering and sniggering.

The English are quite mad, from the lowest to the highest, but I think they will conquer the world for they are the only folk (excepting the brash Americans who do not count) who know that they are right in all things

I ate a great quantity of turbot, some boiled mutton and a few nicely-dressed woodcocks, each set upon a toast which had been spread with the bird’s “trails”, peppered. “Trails” means guts. I also drank some wine.

these people believe that they are the doctors of society, whereas in fact they are only the disease.

How do you know I don’t take sugar?’ I asked rebelliously. ‘No gentleman takes sugar in black coffee. Besides, it’s bad for you.