Craig Brown Quotes

Craig Brown

Profession : Critic

Birth : May 23, 1957

Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.

Craig Brown

How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'

Craig Brown

When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.

Craig Brown

It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.

Craig Brown

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.

Craig Brown

Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.

Craig Brown

Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.

Craig Brown

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

Craig Brown

Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.

Craig Brown

Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.

Craig Brown

Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.

Craig Brown

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

Craig Brown

Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.

Craig Brown

More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.

Craig Brown

Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.

Craig Brown

Personally, I belong to the speedy school of golf. If it were left up to me, I would introduce a new rule that said every golf ball has to stay in motion from the moment it leaves the tee to the moment it plops into the hole, thus obliging each player to run along after his ball and give it another whack before it stops rolling.

Craig Brown

There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.

Craig Brown

When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.

Craig Brown

Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.

Craig Brown

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

Craig Brown