Mark Forsyth Quotes

They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they’re lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.

Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutile (unwash-awayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.

If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn't true.

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a 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. Genius,

The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name.

If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.

Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

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.

Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn't catch on.

Requited love is only a pleasing symmetry, and symmetry is a kind of justice.

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).

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.

Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.