Top 55 A. A. Gill Quotes

Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else – university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.

Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.

I’m terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I’d never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

Learning Jimmy Carr riffs off by heart is not the way to anyone‘s heart, unless you‘re Jimmy Carr. And remember, the two most attractive things in a man is a sense of danger and being able to make a girl feel really safe.

Bald isn’t like being ethnic or disabled. Everyone can and will make jokes about it and expect you to laugh good-naturedly, which you will.

The measure of a man’s life is how he copes with the terrible wall of fear.

The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical.

The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest.

Shorts are silly. Men in shorts are silly men. And silly is the very worst thing a man can be.

I’m frightened of my innate vanity. I mean: the suits lined with scarves? Even I know the warning signs. I could quite easily end up in a tiny Playboy mansion, all on my own.

The answer is that if God exists, he doesn’t seem to mind if you believe in him or not.

The truth is a mayor can actually do very little to alter the course of a huge city run by the free market that is home to banking – the engine room of capitalism.

Boredom is not a thing. It’s not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things and conditions.

All people from small islands dance funny.

Other people’s traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They’re nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn’t want to live with one.

To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.

When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.

Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we already secretly know that it doesn’t do what it promises. Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage at the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash.

Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man – a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man – when you’re doing it for, or with, other people.

A lot of London’s image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

No British TV company could ever make a series like ‘The West Wing’ about British politics. It would beggar credibility. No one could write it with a straight face, or perform it without giggling.

The one thing politicians will always vote for is more politics, so in 2000 they invented the post of mayor of London without ever really thinking what it was a mayor would do.

The Lib-Dems are sidekicks. They were born to be sidekicks and that’s what they should concentrate on being.

Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.

London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren’s churches and ushered in the Georgian city.

I’m too vain to go on TV. I’d be a monster of self-consciousness. Plus, I’ve got a ridiculous voice – I sound like a camp friend of Bertie Wooster’s.

No 13-year-old or over should ever be seen in trousers that finish above the ankle. It doesn’t matter how good your legs are, or if you’re on a beach in Bermuda where they invented the things.

Personal adornment is the only cultural form that everybody in the world takes part in.

I don’t remember ever stealing things, but I suppose I was endlessly borrowing money off people.

There are five great ages of man – five moments when you need to reevaluate everything, clear out the cupboard and the wardrobe, and most importantly, your head. They are 13, 20, 30, 40 and 60. All men need to know this.

The only acceptable cravat is the original Croat one.

Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie.

Gift giving is one of the oldest forms of human interaction. It is a behaviour all cultures and all classes share.

If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Frightened is the natural state for all men.

The more there is on offer, the more you don’t want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.

So much of life is not about whether you’re good or bad, or right or wrong, or can afford or not afford – it’s just about timing.

Nature gave you your look and there’s only a limited amount you can do about that, but what you wear is the skin you choose for yourself.

The real question is: if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.

I tell you, once a girl’s got a dose of novels she‘s a pushover for iambic pentameter.

One of the small joys that’s easy to miss in London is the blue plaques on buildings. These are put up to commemorate the famous on the houses they lived in.

The problem with a man bag is that it’s called a man bag.

People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it’ll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn’t.

I don’t know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

If you’re bored, it’s because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It’s the most interesting thing you’ll ever do.

I’ve often been accused of dressing too well. I’ve always been fascinated by fashion, though I don’t think I’m particularly fashionable.

Texting isn’t writing. It’s not like letter writing. Texting is short scriptwriting. It’s a collaborative soap opera where nothing happens.

Songs are all poetry, and they don’t make any sense.

When you look at traditions closely, examine what they really are, you realize they’re made up of layers and layers of deferrals, delays, indecisions, tomorrows and long lunches.

Suits are malevolent magicians‘ sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.

In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet.

People who know there is a god and people who know there isn’t live in exactly the same world. Same number of hours in the day, same weather, same football results. They both love their children and die of the same diseases.

A cravat is the only item of named after Croatians. Balkan mercenaries were brought to Paris by Louis XIV. Their strange and exotic attire attracted the French bon hommes, who were wearing formal ruffs, and who immediately took to the simple and relaxed military cloth tied at the neck.