Frederic Raphael Quotations

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

During the years when the barely educated immigrants were being replaced by barely educated native sons, Hollywood . . . proved a more reliable, cost-effective means of securing world domination than any nuclear arsenal or diplomatic démarche.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.

Talk isn't work. Work is when you have pages in the evening that you didn't have in the morning.

Mass communication communicates massively: its language lacks precise articulation and avoids demanding terms; it argues for the kind of behavior in life which will make a "good program": ethic equals showbiz.

One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.

Words, isolated in the velvet of radio, took on a jeweled particularity. Television has quite the opposite effect: words are drowned in the visual soup in which they are obliged to be served.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?

At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally predictable from beginning to end.

I could do without sex. Don't really like it that much. If I could just feel complete.

We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off.

Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.

Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.

The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?