Mark Forsyth Quotes

If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell’s product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy’. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello’. This seems unfair.

The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.

Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.

The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all 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.

The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.

When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.

After all, fiction is only fact minus time.

All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words “Hey, boy.” And it grated. It really grated. That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words “Hey, man.” The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification; it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy. It worked. White people were so confused by “Hey, man” that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress. Now,

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.

Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within.

The medievals often mixed up their Gs and Ws, which is why another word for guarantee is warranty.

Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.

Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he [Cab Calloway] helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to the movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them. Kill me is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way.

The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.