Monty Don Quotes

I get this a lot: 'Oh, can you take a picture with my baby? Can you hold the baby?' I don't want to hold your baby! I'll hold my baby. I don't like holding someone else's baby. I'm serious! You never know what could happen. It's such an awkward position you're put in, and it's like, 'No, sorry.'

I'll say this, and this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality: You do not want to get licked in the face repeatedly by another human being. You just don't. It's not pleasant.

I think privacy is important, and it's important you don't bore people with your own boring self.

Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British - a nation for whom the phrase: 'How are you?' really means: 'Please say one word, then leave me alone.'

In London, people don't make eye contact; it's almost too provocative.

If I'm in a bar and I gotta be sitting next to some clown who's like, "It's my tune," I don't want to hear you belt out Bruce Springsteen. That's why we have jukeboxes! Let's let Bruce be Bruce.

It's not considered polite in Russia to count the money in someone else's pocket.

You know, almost everyone is an irritant to me. I think people have forgotten what the word 'public' means. 'Public' means you're going to be irritated. It's a natural consequence of leaving one's home. You go outside, and there are people who are irritating. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, and someone berates me for smoking. I look at the person and think, but what about your shoes? How can you wear shoes like that and have the confidence to accost someone like me?

Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.

I find it very annoying when people want to sit next to each other at a booth.

I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are “bad with names.” No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people’s names isn’t a neurological condition; it’s a choice. You choose not to make learning people’s names a priority. It’s like saying, “Hey, a disclaimer about me: I’m rude.

You have babies at home. And you have a life. And if you don't, you have to realize that we're people and that we just need privacy and we need our respect. And those are things that you have to have as a human being.

Where I'm from, there's two things you don't mess with. You don't mess with a man's woman, or his hat DON'T TOUCH A MAN'S HAT!

I love people and want to be good to people. If I'm in restaurant and somebody doesn't treat a waitress right, I literally will leave. I will unfriend you. You are not my friend anymore.

The only true source of politeness is consideration,--that vigilant moral sense which never loses sight of the rights, the claims, and the sensibilities of others. This is the one quality, over all others, necessary to make a gentleman.

I don't really check out other people's butts.

Your Great-Aunt Muriel doesn't agree, I just met her upstairs while she was giving Fleur the tiara. "She said 'Oh dear, is this the muggle born?' and then, 'Bad posture, skinny ankles.'" Don't take it personally, she's rude to everyone," said Ron. "Talking about Muriel?" inquired George, reemerging from the marquee with Fred. "Yeah, she's just told me my ears are lopsided. Old bat.

When people want me to sign an autograph in a restaurant, and I'm eating. I don't even have to say no, I just kind of stop and look at them ... "Oh, okay. I'll ... I'll come back."

Oh, this shouldn't be allowed. There should be a rule which says that people you've met in the gym should never meet you in real life.

Aspects of life here civility, courtesy, coziness have always bound Britons to their country . . . They are part of the British myth, along with lovely countryside, dogs and horses, rose gardens, the Armada, the Battle of Britain.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

When one is polite in German, one lies.

When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

English people ... never speak, excepting in cases of fire or murder, unless they are introduced.

Not everyone is comfortable with the kissing ritual. My husband is one of them. Her refuses to press lips with anyone except his wife, mother, and dog. If someone wanted to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he would refuse until he had been formally introduced.