Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I do know how to count.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.

I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.

Little boys have amazing minds.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

At 83 Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

Some people just don’t have high enough IQs to compete.

IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever.

God has given each one of us a gift greater than a thousand I.B.M. machines. It is called a memory, and everything that passes through our five senses is stored in this faculty.