Quotes from Rupert Smith

Some mistakes are worth making twice.

I'm an actor." "Oh Christ." "And a writer." "Oh double Christ.

Fabulous lover, excellent decorator - rotten writer? Nobody can be good at everything, and two out of three ain't bad.

The lesser the talent, the longer they spent on the red carpet.

Secure the hearts of the nation's menopausal millions, Eileen knew, and no jury would dare convict her.

Why, oh why won't she just overdose?

Adultery would be punishable by stoning if Annette had her way; I sometimes wonder if she's secretly Muslim.

I began to think that my life, although profoundly boring on the surface, was quite interesting in literary terms.

I was free, yes, but what good was freedom without knowledge?

I was free, yes, but what good was freedom without knowledge? Knowledge was coming, lurking in the future like the serpent in the garden, and with knowledge came love and the bitter sting of regret, the pain of exile from paradise

We got plenty of laughs, but not always for the right reasons.

I can be terribly vulgar in private life, especially after a nip of dry sherry.

Happiness is marvellous in real life, but it's a terrible handicap for an artist.

I firmly believe in shutting up when you've got nothing worthwhile to say. There's nothing worse than these writers who churn out book after book, each one a little duller, until nobody can remember why they liked them in the first place.

What the fuck are you doing," he said, "hiding away in your parents' house? You should be back here, where it's all happening! Life!" He gestured around the pub, a forlorn place with bare floorboards covered in fag ends; who knows what visions he saw in his mind.

And I know that I would take one night with him, one hour, against everything that the world, or Hitler, can throw at me.

Armed conflict is a human condition, and I do not doubt we will continue to reinvent it from generation to generation.

War no longer exists.

Capability = Means × Way^2 × 3xWill

The ends for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided.