Quotes from Craig Brown

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.

For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.

Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.

Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.

As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.

Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.

The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.

The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.

Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.

In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.

In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.

There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.

Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.

The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.

Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.

When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.

One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.