Alan Davies Quotes

Jal Mahal, Jaipur, holds a special place for me and it is especially beautiful by night. I enjoy our stay at the old havelis in the region.

You absorb 2,000 years of history just by being near the Thames.

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

I don't want to be cliched, but Buckingham Palace is beautiful, and the old red telephone booths are really interesting to me. I've always wanted to see those.

There are stories and history everywhere in London.

I love the streets of Kolkata, and I admire the old architectural buildings.

I'm more inclined towards old churches and dusty museums.

Spain is so different from the United States. It seemed to have a history, and the buildings are years and years and years old. Here in the United States an old building is about 17 (years old), and over there it's from 500 B.C., it's incredible.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.

Jaipur has definitely turned into a very beautiful city.

Lucca, in Italy, is my favorite vacation spot.

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

Given this voice, I know it does sound like I've come from money. But my dad was Canadian and my mum Hungarian, so it's not like I have some high-society, upper-class English background.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

Obama took a tour of the Great Wall of China and said, 'We need one of these things around the White House.'

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.

It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.

Norwich is a very fine city, and the castle, which stands in the middle of it, on a hill, is truly majestic.

I'm passionate about history and there's no more historic place than London. We're sitting on a thousand years of history and you can smell it as you're walking around the streets.

Northern Ireland is the world’s best kept secret, both in the character of its people and its scenery.

I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar.

When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.