Tom Sharpe Quotes

They have more luck than bulls

The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State.

Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked.

I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream.

The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "" to Motor Mechanics.

By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house.

Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards.

"Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools.

'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'

I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens

There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.

If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.

All is fair in love, war and tax evasion.

Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money.

While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact.