A.A. Gill > Quotes

“You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.”
― AA Gill

“Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.”
― A.A. Gill, Table Talk

“America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths. There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme. It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say. There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax. And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers. All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“Rolf Harris is a hard man to hate, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try”
― A.A.Gill

“America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“When you’re a visitor to a city, you like to hurry up the habits, lay down a pattern, gain predictability in place of roots.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Knowledge acquired outdoors always seems to have a greater, hardier wisdom than the stuff you find at a desk on a computer.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“America has always understood that it is defined by what it stands against more than what it stands for.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“before Detroit was called the Paris of the West it was known as the Arsenal of Liberty.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Most journeys in all of the world start not with bright expectations, a sense of adventure or a bucket and spade, but an empty stomach.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn’t take them, or that you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them. Drug companies can find prophylactics for rich Western holiday-makers, but not for people who live with disease the other 50 weeks of the year.”
― Adrian Gill, The Best of A.A. Gill

“Walden, which is a diary that oscillates between eye-rolling minute tedium and laughable hyperbole, with sections of profound whimsy and social condescension.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“America is Europe’s greatest invention.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“The noisy, lumpy, hilarious breath runs through me like a great brightness. Magical, free laughter that spins me back to being a child; a hiccuping, chorus-rolling, crashing, howling, sobbing laughter, so unexpected, so strange, like finding that all together we can sing.”
― A.A. Gill, Pour Me, a Life

“So much of the Western tradition deals with the most despairing and angst-ridden emotions, but they’re movies made for kids. It’s as if America was trying to pass on an unpleasant but necessary lesson of life: that you were alone, and you needed to toughen up and shut up.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“cleverness that the French adore and always mistake for wisdom.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“The definition of wit is a joke that doesn't make you laugh.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“When asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Zhou Enlai famously answered that it was too early to tell, which is trite about the Terror, but it would be true about America. It’s too early to tell. If you take a timeline from the first settlements in the 1600s to the present, and compare it with the foundation of modern Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, at the same point in our history the Vikings are attacking Orkney, and Alfred is the first king of bits of what will one day be England.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Europe is, for the most part, a hugger-mugger continent that works best on the consensus of inertia and precedent. Those who have dogmatic and contrarian beliefs can cause disproportionate ructions and ripples in our overcrowded and hierarchical communities.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“There is a theory that bravery and intrepidness and extreme risk taking are all sorts of madness, and that only one person in 1,000 or 100,000 is born without the normal safety rail of self-preservation, the pressing need to turn around and go home when it’s dark, cold and frightening.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“The first lift shaft was built four years before the first lift. In 1852 Peter Cooper was constructing the Cooper Union building in New York with an elevator shaft, in the sure and certain knowledge that if he built it, the lift would come. That isn’t an act of impatience, it’s an act of faith, and it is, archetypally, the act of an American.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Death lends everything a metaphoric imperative. Mundane objects become fetishes when the departed no longer need them, and breakfast conversations grow runic and wise from behind the shadows.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“in the Edwardian way of things, collected indiscriminately and rigorously, with the global kleptomania of empire and the desire to own, calibrate, measure and stuff everything possible, to put all of creation into its place, and place as much of it as possible in glass cases.”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love

“Cannibalism is a Western, white imposition. A retrospective racism. Tribal memory, collective dreams and wishful thinking should, if not silence, then at least reduce to a tearful academic whisper any attempt to discredit the lives of Indians. Haven’t they suffered enough?”
― A.A. Gill, To America with Love