The first sign builders are on their way is when – hey, presto! – a skip appears outside your house. – Craig Brown
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never. – Craig Brown
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private. – Craig Brown
The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival. – Craig Brown
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers. – Craig Brown
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite. – Craig Brown
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
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable. – 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 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
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one. – Craig Brown
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth. – Craig Brown
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day. – Craig Brown
In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life. – Craig Brown
When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I’m not sure why. – Craig Brown
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are. – 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
Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how. – Craig Brown
Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble. – Craig Brown
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor. – Craig Brown
Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws. – Craig Brown
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences. – 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
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 best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible. – 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
What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now. – Craig Brown
