Ronald Frame Quotes

I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

I think people tend to underestimate you when you have a Northern accent, for instance if you have to talk to the CEO of an international company. But then when I'm talking to someone in a factory, it's just like being with my mum's mates.

We judge people based on their clothes, social class, and, dare I say, ethnicity. Our comedians make light of these stereotypes regularly, and we laugh at their accuracy.

They had this movie called Juno about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and it's nominated for an Oscar. That's an unusual experience for me, 'cause when a black girl gets pregnant it ain't no Oscar. It's social work and a box of condoms is what that is.

When white people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're homeless, when black people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're called rappers.

You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.

The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.

I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!” “You did!” she retorted. “And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!” “Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!

Basically the French are all peasants.

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

Teenage rebellion is for suburban schoolchildren. Get over it.

Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.

Only the poor are handicapped by honor.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

Introversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.

Prejudices of all kinds have their strongest holds in the minds of the vulgar and the ignorant.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.