Quotes from James Hamilton-Paterson

Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly comtemplating their overdrafts.

The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.

Racism. . . . fuelled by bitter assertions that no immigrant ever has the least respect for the environment in his adopted country because he never really believes it's his.

I also wish I'd been born with a clearly defined talent for something, or else stupid.

A culinary triumph: the ingenious use of food as an offensive weapon.

I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant.

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

I'm interested in things that are none of my business, and I'm bored by things that are important to know." —Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes strip cartoon, 1994)

We hang here, inquisitive carbon-based life forms, knowing that every atom of carbon now in our bodies was once in the interior of a star.

Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be bought or sold or measured by scientists. Why should artists have to acknowledge the complete supremacy of materialism? Must everything mysterious be exploded or all unaccountable things explained away? And if so, what is gained? Plain men drudging in a world of plain things. That's not the world I know and it's one I've no wish to know.

Out of the 65 million men mobilised between 1914 and 1918 by the Allies and the Central Powers combined, it is now generally estimated that some 9 million were killed outright and 21 million wounded. Even allowing for the first-ever air war's restricted dimensions, the toll it took of flying men was minuscule compared to that of the trenches.