Michael Frayn Quotes.
We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children.
A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.
You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there’s nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.
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.
You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn’t seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that’s your bad luck.
It’s funny – there’s nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.
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.
One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled “fog”. The motorist replies: “What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying ‘fog’ because of the fog.”
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.
Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.
No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.
I feel bad that I don’t feel worse.
When anyone says they often think something, it means they’ve just thought of it now.
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.