Quotes from Jonathan Meades

The construction industry likes nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they can impose a brand new building, because that way they can make more money.

I think television is a medium which has the potential to do great things but has been traduced by these... terrible people who rise through the ranks.

When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.

Régis Jauffret got it right when he said that he was disgusted by writers who think of their readers.

The apocalyptic dystopias dreamed up by anti-urbanists were peopled by seething masses welded into the terrible organism of the mob, which is also a standard-issue subject of expressionism.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. Orson Welles

Even when broaching the most familiar subjects – especially when broaching the most familiar subjects – we have always to be looking to illumine them in ways that make them seem unfamiliar, fresh, in ways that make us believe we have not seen them before.

signify an intention that I should become any more

The notion of severality of function is, regrettably, one that was gradually abandoned throughout the twentieth century because it did not accord with modernism's puritanical espousal of 'honesty'.

ritual heightens grief, makes it momentous, enforces concentration on its object who is yet gone for so short a time that it is unimaginable that he will not come back – the conviction of death's certainty is founded on prolonged exposure to absence rather than on the presence of the meat in the coffin or on bearing witness to the agent (physical or chemical, alien or quisling, sudden or chronic) of that immeasurable change.

I genuinely find it difficult to think of places that I'd never want to see again. It might be because part of my career has been concerned with writing about topography.

I think the only remotely interesting drug was acid. I had a slightly peculiar attitude towards it I think. Just about everything about hippydom I hated.