Michael Frayn Quotations

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.

Highbrow lowbrows. No - not even genuine highbrow lowbrows. Middlebrow highbrow lowbrows.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes.It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"...The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog.

And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world.

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success, then that's your bad luck.

A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child's hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult's hand and imagination to grasp.

It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them.