Noel Coward Quotes

I like long walks, especialy when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Wouldn't it be dreadful to live in a country where they didn't have tea?

Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?

Work is more fun than fun.

Strange how potent cheap music is.

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

Work hard, do the best you can, don't ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.

I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.

AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.

its discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by decite

Entering an white tie and tails party wearing an ordinary suit, he announced,"Please, I don't want anyone to apologize for over dressing.

She's a self-conscious vampire ... and she goes about using sex as a sort of shrimping net.

Las Vegas: It was not cafe society, it was Nescafe society.

There are dark times just around the corner. There are dark clouds travelling through the sky. And it's no good whining about a silver lining. For we know from experience they won't roll by.

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.—Noel Coward

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

There are no footnotes or endnotes in this translation. If any explanations or clarifications are required, they are embedded in the body of the text, so as not to interrupt the flow of the words. After all, as Noel Coward once famously remarked, “Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

[Garry Essendine]: That is no prostitute, but the wife of one of my best friends!

All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.

A.E. Matthews ambled through This Was a Man like a charming retriever who has buried a bone and can't quite remember where.

Still, it was impossible to deny: Going all the way to London without taking time out to attend a few horrendous plays was like making a special trip to Hell without ever asking to meet Satan. So this time around, I decided to plunge in headfirst. Never a fan of Noel Coward, I nonetheless reported to the Albery Theatre, forked over a king’s ransom for a good seat, and watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives.

Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.

Ford was humming something. it was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. if anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. it would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons that he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the "About the Boy" bit. he was annoyed that nobody asked.

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?” -Noel Coward

The discussion later turned to Jamaica, which Michael had visited in January. Noel Coward had spent a good deal of time there, Michael noted. Michael met Coward once in a hotel: “He took me upstairs. He didn’t seduce me. I didn’t know about such things then,” he claimed. “An innocent abroad,” I commented. “Yes, I was.

Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair." Terkel, who is 95, has long been a Chicago icon, every bit as accessible and integral to the cultural life of the Windy City as Susan Sontag was to New York. He had shared the bus stop with this couple for several mornings but they had always failed to acknowledge him. "It hurts my ego," he quips. "But this morning the bus was late and I thought, this is my chance." The rest of the story is his. "I say, 'Labour Day is coming up.' Well, it was the wrong thing to say. He looks toward me with a look of such contempt it's like Noel Coward has just spotted a bug on his collar. He says, 'We despise unions.' I thought, oooooh. The bus is still late. I've got a winner here. Suddenly I'm the ancient mariner and I fix him with my glittering eye. 'How many hours a day do you work?' I ask. He says, 'Eight.' 'How comes you don't work 18 hours a day like your great-great-grandfather did? You know why? Because four guys got hanged in Chicago in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day ... For you.

Science has many uses. Its chief one, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich: ‘Kleptomania’ for example.

1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones’s lost year. I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart.

In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing—at least among people with pretensions to rank—was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose own laughter was seldom observed, thought a lady might laugh where a gentleman should keep a straight face. Frederick the Great might laugh with a Frenchman, such as Voltaire, but “would not so condescend” with his compatriots.

The trouble with the world is, Frankie, that there are too many ideals and too little horse sense . . . Human beings don’t like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else . . . they’re not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who’ll give ’em half a chance.

Dane lived above a greengrocer’s shop at 26 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, with her secretary, Olwen Bowen, herself a writer of children’s books, but who now devoted herself to the care of her companion. ‘One climbed up a rickety staircase and there was Winifred, surrounded by her paintings, sculptures, a piano and goodness knows how many books, where she would give many after-the-theatre parties . . .

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.

Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they’re counting the night’s take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn’t it swoony, it’s still going. . . . Everybody you don’t suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let’s not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty’s wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it’s a children’s story?

The British oligarch does not rest, as so many oligarchies do, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. Or even on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.” “To be clever enough to get all that money, you must be stupid enough to want it.” “Gold in banks is unreality. But coins in your pocket are a kind of truth.” And: “The man who does not look at his change is no true poet.

He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.

Morecambe and Wise, the famous team of Northern comedians, used to complain about the propensity of Yorkshire audiences to “zip their teeth up,” as they put it. Eric Morecambe claimed one man in Leeds said to him, “Ee, lad, thou wert so funny tonight I almost had to laff.

Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, the leading nineteenth-century Prussian strategist, was said to have laughed only twice: once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable, and once when his mother-in-law died. Martin Heidegger, whom some regard as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century but many find incomprehensible, was even more sparing of his mirth. He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.

Playwright Noel Coward once said, “Work is more fun than fun.” I included that quote in a seminar guidebook for a sales group a year ago and one of the participants in the back of the room raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Steve, who is this Noel Coward guy? I figure with a quote like that he’s either a porn star or a professional golfer.” That line got a great laugh at my expense, but it also revealed a truth (which almost all humor does). People believe that the fun jobs are always somewhere else. “If only I could get a job like that!” “If only I had been a pro golfer!” But the truth is that fulfilling and fun work can be found in anything. The more we consciously introduce game-playing elements (personal bests listed, goals, time limits, competition with self or others, record-keeping, and so on), the more fun the activity becomes.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” -Noel Coward

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Judith (sadly): A change has come over my children of late. I have tried to shut my eyes to it, but in vain. At my time of life one must face bitter facts!

John Gielgud thought ‘he was never the same after leaving England, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. I think that tax business, and the way people reacted to it, shocked him . . . He wasn’t much good as a tax exile. He didn’t do a lot with his money. His houses were commonplace, the food dreadful, the decoration pretty amateurish.

Afterwards we were having drinks, and were just about to leave – Noel was very good at leavetaking – when they asked him to go and see someone who was about to have “deep sleep” treatment. When some mental cases are so disturbed, they put them to sleep for a day and a night. Anyway, this poor sailor had been shipwrecked in the North Sea three times, and had been stranded in freezing water for hours, and had fishbite – the fish actually bite your legs . . . Noel . . . stayed there for well over half an hour, talking to the boy in the dark, telling him it would be all right. Later we got a letter from the hospital saying that Noel had done more for that boy than all their treatment could.

An echo from the past when, innocent We looked upon the present with delight And doubted not the future would be kinder And never knew the loneliness of night.

Ned Sherrin Ned Sherrin is a satirist, novelist, anthologist, film producer, and celebrated theater director who has been at the heart of British broadcasting and the arts for more than fifty years. I had met Diana, Princess of Wales--perhaps “I had been presented to” is more accurate--in lineups after charity shows that I had been compering and at which she was the royal guest of honor. There were the usual polite exchanges. On royal visits backstage, Princess Alexandra was the most relaxed, on occasion wickedly suggesting that she caught a glimpse of romantic chemistry between two performers and setting off giggles. Princess Margaret was the most artistically acute, the Queen the most conscientious; although she did once sweep past me to get to Bill Haley, of whom she was a fan. Prince Edward could, at one time, be persuaded to do an irreverent impression of his older brother, Prince Charles. Princess Diana seemed to enjoy herself, but she was still new to the job and did not linger down the line. Around this time, a friend of mine opened a restaurant in London. From one conversation, I gathered that although it was packed in the evenings, business was slow at lunchtime. Soon afterward, I got a very “cloak-and-dagger” phone call from him. He spoke in hushed tones, muttering something like “Lunch next Wednesday, small party, royal person, hush-hush.” From this, I inferred that he wanted me and, I had no doubt, other friends to bring a small party to dress the restaurant, to which he was bringing the “royal person” in a bid to up its fashionable appeal during the day. When Wednesday dawned, the luncheon clashed with a couple of meetings, and although feeling disloyal, I did not see how I was going to be able to round up three or four people--even for a free lunch. Guiltily, I rang his office and apologized profusely to his secretary for not being able to make it. The next morning, he telephoned, puzzled and aggrieved. “There were only going to be the four of us,” he said. “Princess Diana had been looking forward to meeting you properly. She was very disappointed that you couldn’t make it.” I felt suitably stupid--but, as luck had it, a few weeks later I found myself sitting next to her at a charity dinner at the Garrick Club. I explained the whole disastrous misunderstanding, and we had a very jolly time laughing at the coincidence that she was dining at this exclusive club before her husband, who had just been elected a member with some publicity. Prince Charles was in the hospital at the time recuperating from a polo injury. Although hindsight tells us that the marriage was already in difficulties, that was not generally known, so in answer to my inquiries, she replied sympathetically that he was recovering well. We talked a lot about the theater and her faux pas some years before when she had been to Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and confessed to the star, Penelope Keith, that it was the first Coward play that she had seen. “The first,” said Penelope, shocked. “Well,” Diana said to me, “I was only eighteen!” Our meeting was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and as we were both working a lot for AIDS charities, we had many notes to compare and friends to mourn. The evening ended with a dance--but being no Travolta myself, I doubt that my partnering was the high point for her.

At 50 Squadron, there was another verse for the intelligence officer’s long epic verse, set to the tune of Noel Coward’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”: When the sirens moan to awake Cologne They shiver in their shoes; In the Berlin street they’re white as sheets With a tinge of Prussian blues;

Deep in our subconscious... lie all our memories… Forgotten debris of forgotten years Waiting to be recalled… Waiting for some small, intimate reminder… An echo from the past… -- Noel Coward, Nothing Is Lost

Sorel: I wish she hadn’t sent me the beastly book, I must say something nice about it. Simon : The binding’s very dashing.

I am chewing my nails off to the elbow, like Noel Coward’s lady.

Noel (Coward) told me, holding my wrist firmly in his beautiful brown hands which at 67 have a couple of faint liver marks, that E and I were so packed with dynamic personality that he expected us any minute to burst at the seams and flow like volcanic lava.

...I remembered Binkie throwing a few chips of encouragement to me as he said, with a gleam of disaffection, 'Of course, Noel's quite uneducated.' Whether it implied that the Master was as unashamedly ignorant as myself, expelled and barely literate at fifteen, condemned to a fixed condition of 'not being ready for it yet', I hadn't resolved. It merely seemed a piece of clumsy treachery, a fair example of the reverence for academic skill and a classic misapprehension of its link with creative imagination. Even Binkie, from his own more distinguished production, could have deduced that from Shakespeare to Shaw a little Latin and less Greek, or none of either, did no damage to untutored dramatists.

After all, as Noel Coward once famously remarked, “Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.