The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave...

As a kid in British Columbia, going back a long way, I learned to skate.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

All the cliches of glamorous sophistication have little appeal to me. Do I want to live the British version of ‘Dynasty?’ No thanks!

I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang...

Ah. And then you kill him.””No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{…}

What brought the British to the Gambia in the first place – which was bigger than it is now – was trade in ivory because the Gambia had a lot of elephants. They wiped out all the elephants and ended up selling Africans.

If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.

We worked on a few things that we’ve been working on from the British Open onwards with the swing, … What we’ve done from there is incorporate a little bit more shot-making, picturing shots a little bit more, which I had completely gone off of for part of this year.

Tea! That’s all I needed! Good cup of tea! Super-heated infusion of free-radicals and tannin, just the thing for healing the synapses.

I’m actually going in to ER as the new British intern.

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.

I inherited a pound from my British uncle. I’d have rather gotten a dollar, because what do I want with an animal shelter?

The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian ‘parliament’ voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.

Then one woman looked directly at her husband. “Is our place gone?” “I’m afraid so, girl,” he said. “There isn’t much left up there. But we’re alive. We’re all lucky to be alive. We’d have been dead if we’d stayed up above.” “Oh, what a mercy we didn’t!” she exclaimed. “How lucky we are!” Incredible...

I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.

A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world – British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese – and there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

Who am I?” She whispered. Alex opened his mouth as if to correct her, but then he said, “You are my love.

I grinned. “I’m anybody’s for a cuppa and a biscuit.

The British are really good at that. They are so incestuous, … They pass around partners as if it was popcorn at a movie. ‘Do you want some?’ It’s just bizarre.

Royal Young’s writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

The British retreat is over and now the advance will begin.

I am confident that the British people will not be intimidated by terrorism.

When I began visiting Bordeaux in 1979, only a handful of writers were there to taste the wines in the spring (and nearly all were British).

I am very proud to be British. I’m very conscious of carrying my country with me wherever I go. I feel I need to represent it well.

Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind.

One morning, as he sat at his desk, he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves on the path outside his house. He stepped out on to the verandah. There, on a tall grey horse, sat Morgane. ‘I’ve come to have my picture painted,’ she said. She took off her hat and her long black...

Morris Weissman [on the phone, discussing casting for his movie]: “What about Claudette Colbert? She’s British, isn’t she? She sounds British. Is she, like, affected or is she British?

I’ve had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.

The British electors will not vote for a man who does not wear a hat.

A British declaration be taken against Martinez for ‘capturing and robbing us.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

Grandma’s house had the atmosphere of a Tupperware box left out in the sun. Like a tropical flower, she had to be kept warm and moist at all times, or she would wilt and die.

The British have a unique relationship with horses. They are etched into our landscape in chalk, they have been written about, painted, sung about, celebrated and gambled upon for centuries.

When I first did a U.S. pilot season, there were very few British actors schlepping around town trying to get into television. That was 1999.

The mice were furious.”[…]”Oh yes,” said the old man mildly.”Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but…””Ah, but they hadn’t paid for it you see, had they?””Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”[…]”Earthman, the planet you...

Unlike the British we are not going to express our views without the necessary investigations.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

Cavendish was a great Man with extraordinary singularities—His voice was squeaking his manner nervous He was afraid of strangers & seemed when embarrassed to articulate with difficulty—He wore the costume of our grandfathers. Was enormously rich but made no use of his wealth… Cavendish lived latterly the life of a solitary, came to the Club...

The very sight of a daffodil still makes me shiver, because spring in the north of England is always so bitter.

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

I had zero idea of what I was doing.. I honestly had no idea where to start. All I knew was I had something I craved to say.. I wanted to create art that lived on longer than I do. Perseverance and teaching yourself, every day through stress and hard work proves shit really does...

If you can’t tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I’m saying “hoe” or “bitch” I am actually referring to men. …That sounded bad, in someway. But at the end of the day, I’m sick of rappers using “bitches” and “hoes” as terms towards women. Feminists are NOT a...

I don’t know if that’s really necessary. Both AT&T and British Telecom can operate independently — they both have very good global operations.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

UKIP is natural party for Eastern Europeans

Excuse me, I must go and putt

And I definitely do that very British thing of, take things with a pinch of salt, stiff upper lip, you know what I mean?