Gyles Brandreth quotes: the writer’s well-worded advice.
“Don’t switch off. Stay engaged. Resist distraction. Concentrate. Focus. Be present. Smell the coffee. Taste the food. Listen to the speech. Keep that Latin accurate. Stop thinking about what’s coming next, stop checking the mobile, and relish what’s happening now. Seize the day. For all you know, it’s the only one you’ve got. Live in the moment.”
“Live in the moment, don’t resist change and, more bluntly, be happy. The one rule that I believe might well override all others—I’ve witnessed close at hand what happens if you don’t cultivate a passion. You have to have something you just love doing.”
“Begin when you are sure of yourself, and don’t stop because someone else is unsure of you.”
“Having people around you who make you feel good and think you’re good is important.”
“Change is good for us. Change is the salt in the soup of life. Rocking the boat is good for you. Change is good and change is also inevitable. If you resist change you will be unhappy.”
“For many people in business the challenge of change is the greatest challenge. And leadership is not simply about forging ahead, it’s about taking people with you and together building and leading a successful business. A successful business I think needs to be a happy business. And happy businesses are more successful than unhappy ones.”
“Language is power. It’s what defines us. Words do make a difference. They can reinforce stereotypes, cause offense, undermine, hurt and humiliate. You don’t have to wrap everything you say in cotton wool, but you should choose your words carefully. Good communication is about courtesy and kindness as well as clarity and getting your message across.”
“I’m fascinated by happiness: what it is, who gets it and how. It’s been a real journey.”
“Very few people are happy just sitting around not doing much. An engagement with life is essential to happiness.”
“The peach-out-of-reach in the adjacent orchard is always more alluring than the apple on the ground in one’s own.”
“I love the old, but I’m intrigued by the new. And sometimes excited by it, too.”
“When men give up saying what is charming they give up thinking what is charming.”
“The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.”
“If you’d spent your life being called Gyles Brandreth, you would crawl across broken glass to achieve the bliss, the simplicity, the purity, the joy of simply being called Bob.”
“Since I was a boy, I have been an avid admirer of both the works of Oscar Wilde and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. For the first 10 years of my life I lived a stone’s throw from Tite Street, the London home of Sherlock Holmes. When I was 10, my family moved to Baker Street.”
“My father was a lawyer and my mother was a teacher, so words were very important to me as a child. I learned to play Scrabble very young, and used to play it with an older gentleman who was the founder of my school. That introduction to Scrabble as a child led to eventually founding the National Scrabble Championships.”
“I love meeting interesting people. Achievers. I find that exciting.”
“I also liked being busy. I saw myself as a bit of a professional.”
“The truth is, I do actually in certain areas want to make a difference rather than make a noise.”
“I’m typical middle class, middle-aged, middle England. Those are my values. I am what my parents made me. One of the reasons that I’m doing all the things I’m doing is to fulfill an old-fashioned agenda.”
“What I do like is getting what I want.”
“I get to my desk at eight in the morning and I leave it at seven in the evening and I just work away. I’m a work machine.”
“I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do—the day after.”
“I describe what I do on the day that I do it. The nice thing for me is that I do lots of different things on lots of different days.”
“I’ve been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don’t keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it.”
“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis? F*ck off! No, hold on, it’s the longest word in the dictionary. It’s the name of a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; and if you break it down into its constituent parts, you can master the spelling quite easily. Pneu-mono-ultra-micro-scopic-silico-volcano-coni-osis. There! Done! Hooray!”
“Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn’t when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn’t set in stone.”
“Those are the great loves of my life: my wife and children, comedy, the theatre, and the English language.”
“People often ask me why I am still working at my age. I say that I have to, that I need the money. I’ve got three children and seven grandchildren, and I’ve discovered over the years that money is the one thing keeping me in touch with them!”
“I’m not really anticipating spending weekends with the pipe and slippers around the fire any time soon. But why not? Because people don’t sit around being happy. You get happiness from engaging with life.”
“In all seriousness though, why should one be slowing down? What is the reason? I think that slowing down is risky. You’ve got to keep going. Life is for living.”
“So for me, every night is rewarding.”
“Be glad of what you have got and not miserable for what you would liked to have had, and not over-anxious about what the future may bring.”
