Adrian Anthony Gill Quotes

Brits have a better sense of humor in most ways. It's darker, more cutting.

The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.

It was Nick Willing's intention to make 'Hatter' as sarcastically British funny as he could.

Of current British stuff, 'Brass Eye' was one of my favorite shows.

Earnestness makes British people gag.

I do, I love to mock stuff. I am a British person.

British humour is very cruel. It's my favourite kind of humour; if it isn't cruel and funny it doesn't really cut the cake for me.

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

I've always been interesting in characters that challenge people and who are not always that easy to like.

If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.

That's one of the best things about characters like Indiana Jones. I mean, he's funny. He's done really wicked things.

The best characters are always wretchedly flawed

The place was so British, I wouldn't have been surprised if the mice wore monocles.

British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.

I like whimsy and satire, and that's what Americans like so much about Brits. We bring subtlety and sense of humor that you sometimes lack. We have a very long history of importing Brits like Christopher Hitchens who are better at it than Americans are.

Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view.

I guess, on my list, going back to some old American stuff and British stuff that I used to love in the '80s, would be a British show called Dad's Army, which recently just turned into a movie.

I have no faith in a human critter who hasn't one or two bad habits.

There's more empathetic representations than we're used to seeing. I honestly feel like in the early days of Hollywood, women did have those. Women had very traditional roles in society of wife and mother, but when they went to the movies, they got to see women be, like, really cool, amazing characters and femme fatales and all of this. And then there was just this systemic reaction where it was all about, "How do we make money?" And everybody wants to sell things to boys. And then women's entertainment became devalued in a way that I think is disrespectful and hurtful.

All of us have areas of weakness. God wants these character flaws to show us how totally dependent we are upon Him. When we handle them properly, they drive us into a deeper, more intimate relationship with the Lord. But uncontrolled weakness wreaks havoc in a person's life.

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses.

When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

Many take pleasure in spreading abroad the weakness of an exalted character.

You will form a very inadequate estimate of a man's character, if you judge by what a fond sister says of him. The worst of them generally know how to hide their misdeeds from their sisters' eyes, and their mother's, too.