We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87.
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?
iMac is next year's computer for $1,299, not last year's computer for $999.
Comic relief raised ?8 million last year. Britain sold hundreds of millions worth of weapons last year to Africa. So next year, one country in Africa will get blown to smithereens, and the next country along will get a visit from Lenny Henry. And both will feel bitterly jealous of each other.
Last year nothing happened
The year before nothing happened
And the year before that nothing
happened.
If I had my druthers I’d be twenty-three years old for the rest of my life. Which would last another three thousand years.
The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village. I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years' life.