P.K. Shaw Quotes

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.

It ["Begin the Beguine"] became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band played something melodic and still gave it a beat.

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.

My mother adores singing and plays piano. My uncle was a phenomenal pianist. My brother John is a double bassist. I used to play the piano, badly, and cello. My brother Peter played violin.

The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted.

Theater dates very quickly.

This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.

Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.

I can hardly decide what plays I should be in.

I enjoy making films, but my heart is in the stage. Every night you have to be on. There's no second take.

Now I have begun to get interested in films and I just hope that people start becoming interested in me to do more films.

I loathe bad theater and most theatre is very bad because its repetitious, unexciting and, dangerously, it is sometimes praised for those things.

I had a ball doing Harry Potter.

A relationship is sent by God and accident.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.

There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

Life is a constant becoming: all stages lead to the beginning of others.

Principles without programs are platitudes.

It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.

All great Truth first starts as Blasphemy.

The minorities are sometimes right. The majorities never.

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

What's the use of money if you have to earn it.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

Be as romantic as you please about love ... but you mustn't be romantic about money.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.

Poverty does not produce unhappiness: It produces degradation.

The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

Sexually,Woman is Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement.

Brigham Young lived to become immortal in history as an American Moses by leading his people through the wilderness into an unpromised land.

Revelations: A curious record of the visions of a drug addict.

Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.

The ideal love affair should be conducted by post.

Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

I don't. I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?

You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.

The criminal law is no use to decent people.