Mark Forsyth Quotes

Malcolm X observed that: Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action.

Krafft-Ebing was [...], essentially, the first doctor to start writing case histories of people whose sexual behaviour wasn’t entirely respectable.

The book that resulted, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was so scandalous that large chunks of it had to be written in Latin, in order to keep it out of the hands of the prurient public. The idea was that if you were clever enough to understand Latin, you couldn’t possibly be a pervert (something that nobody mentioned to Caligula).

I had to go outside. I had to let the element of chance in.

Almost any question you ask can be answered. It’s only the questions that you didn’t know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.

I’ve been too fucking busy, and vice versa.

Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly what you tell them to do. So the internet means that, though you get what you already knew you wanted, you’ll never get anything more.

Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten.

Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy.

Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he rejected Freud’s pansexualism (not a sin of cookery, but the belief that everything comes down to nooky) and ran off to become a Jungian.

whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles.

Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.

Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because 1 didn't need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. Again.

These figures grow like wildflowers, but they can be cultivated too. I do not believe that The Beatles had any idea what anadiplosis was, any more than I believe that the Rolling Stones knew about syllepsis. They knew what worked, and it did.

The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all the poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.

Shakespeare got better because he learnt. Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.

"The Oxford English Dictionary itself feebly admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark," or "pale, colourless, wan, livid".'

...

Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both.

Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which color burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.

The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome.

...

The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?

Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colors — black and white — are simply different interpretations of what blank means."

According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth),

Just adding (for some only mind number ONE)4 ‘I, I shall go in, when the major has done:’ The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in; And, not quite aware of priority S — -ING, Squeez’d awhile; ‘Well!’ says he, ‘then, the best friends MUST PART;’ Crap! Crap! ’twas a moist one! a right Brewer’s ****! And, finding it vain, to be stopping the lake; ‘Zounds!’ says he, ‘then, here goes man! I’ve brew’d; so, I’ll bake.

Under the tutelage of time, nonsense becomes geography.