Quotes from A.A. Gill

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.

America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

America's genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth.

When you're a visitor to a city, you like to hurry up the habits, lay down a pattern, gain predictability in place of roots.

Knowledge acquired outdoors always seems to have a greater, hardier wisdom than the stuff you find at a desk on a computer.

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance.

America has always understood that it is defined by what it stands against more than what it stands for.

before Detroit was called the Paris of the West it was known as the Arsenal of Liberty.

Most journeys in all of the world start not with bright expectations, a sense of adventure or a bucket and spade, but an empty stomach.

respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.

Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew.

There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can't make worse.

Walden, which is a diary that oscillates between eye-rolling minute tedium and laughable hyperbole, with sections of profound whimsy and social condescension.

What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don't go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.

America is Europe's greatest invention.

The noisy, lumpy, hilarious breath runs through me like a great brightness. Magical, free laughter that spins me back to being a child; a hiccuping, chorus-rolling, crashing, howling, sobbing laughter, so unexpected, so strange, like finding that all together we can sing.

So much of the Western tradition deals with the most despairing and angst-ridden emotions, but they're movies made for kids. It's as if America was trying to pass on an unpleasant but necessary lesson of life: that you were alone, and you needed to toughen up and shut up.

cleverness that the French adore and always mistake for wisdom.

The definition of wit is a joke that doesn't make you laugh.

Europe is, for the most part, a hugger-mugger continent that works best on the consensus of inertia and precedent. Those who have dogmatic and contrarian beliefs can cause disproportionate ructions and ripples in our overcrowded and hierarchical communities.

There is a theory that bravery and intrepidness and extreme risk taking are all sorts of madness, and that only one person in 1,000 or 100,000 is born without the normal safety rail of self-preservation, the pressing need to turn around and go home when it's dark, cold and frightening.

The first lift shaft was built four years before the first lift. In 1852 Peter Cooper was constructing the Cooper Union building in New York with an elevator shaft, in the sure and certain knowledge that if he built it, the lift would come. That isn't an act of impatience, it's an act of faith, and it is, archetypally, the act of an American.

It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.

Death lends everything a metaphoric imperative. Mundane objects become fetishes when the departed no longer need them, and breakfast conversations grow runic and wise from behind the shadows.