Quotes from Hugh Laurie

The French came to Morocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense - all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization - and when five o'clock came, and the French looked upon their works and saw that they were good, they reckoned they had bloody well earned the right to live like Maharajahs. Which, for a time, they did.

I stood and waited on the open second-floor landing, and tried to imagine what appalling series of bureaucratic errors had led to this estate being so well looked after. In most parts of London, they collect the dustbins from the middle-class streets and empty them into the council estates, before setting fire to a couple of Ford Cortinas on the pavement.

If you want a place guarded properly, hire Germans.

I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor. He didn't make any other noise, and the corridor didn't do anything that corridors don't normally do.

It was a bright red TVR Griffith, with a five litre V8 engine, and an exhaust note that could have been heard in Peking. It fell some way short of being the ideal car for a discreet surveillance operation

there's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.

she wore a Walther TPH .22 automatic in her right hand. The TPH is a pretty little thing. It has a straight blowback action, a six-round box magazine and two-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. It's also utterly useless as a firearm, because unless you can guarantee hitting either the heart or the brain first time, you're only going to annoy the person you're shooting at. For most people, a wet mackerel is the better choice of weapon.

Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn't remember in the morning.

I dare say being a receptionist at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square gets you a reasonable salary and all the nylon stockings you can eat

Carl waited while I knocked, and when the door opened I came within an ace of slipping a couple of pound coins into his gloved hand and asking him to book me a table at L'Epicure. Luckily, he stopped me by saluting violently, then turned on his heel and set off back down the corridor at a hundred and ten paces to the minute.

Not surprisingly, they frisked me like they were taking a frisking exam. To get into the Royal College of Frisking. Five times, head to toe, mouth, ears, crotch, soles of shoes. They tore most of my clothes from my body, and left me looking like an opened Christmas present.

No Sunglasses went on to side-lights, which cut our speed down.

We exchanged wry military grins that told each other how much we hated those fly-blown pieces of shit who tied the hands of decent men and called it politics.

Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn't, but it should be.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers. N. CHAMBERLAIN

I didn't feel so bad about the myrrh, because I've never been quite certain what it is.

They will come at dawn, I think to myself. The way attackers have done since attacking was first invented. Dawn. When we're tired, hungry, bored, scared. They will come in at dawn, and they will come in from the East, with a low sun behind them.

He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened.

Somewhere a clock ticked. Quite fast. Too fast, it seemed to me, to be counting seconds. But then this was an American building, and maybe Americans had decided that seconds were just too goddamned slow, and how's about a clock that can do a minute in twenty seconds? That way, we get more goddamned hours in a goddamned day than these faggot limeys.

I've been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand,but when you've had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has 'HATE' tattooed on one hand, and 'HATE' on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing little things in life. Like not being in prison.

Then there are the books that shine in my memory, milestones along the horizontal course of my life. I remember not just the books themselves but the chair I sat in, the shoes I wore, the woman I loved, what song was on the charts at the time. None of which makes them good books, exactly, although all of them are — it just means that they are mine. They really happened.

The meter said six pounds, so I passed a ten pound note through the window and watched a fifteen-second production of 'I'm Not Sure I've Got Change For That', starring licensed cab driver 99102, before getting out and heading back down the street.

Not before the harvest is in, and the mules are rested

I was standing by the door wearing my smartest and best 'I am psychiatrically A1' expression.