Sandi Toksvig Quotes

The press portrayed me as a joke and a clown.

Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.

This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benovelent deity trying to save us from another Titan.

I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

I'd say that about 82 percent of what I write is bad, but don't go by me; I'm as bad a judge as I am a writer. Look, if it were all good, you'd be paying twice as much for this book.

Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

A man must serve his time to every trade, Save censure-critics all are ready made. Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote With just enough learning to misquote.

Dr. Calder [a Unitarian minister] said of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson on the publications of Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, that he was like Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own pack.

Much malice mingled with a little wit Perhaps may censure this mysterious writ.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,-- Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.

[Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.

Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.

Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.