Michael Frayn Quotes & Sayings

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself. — Michael Frayn

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog" ... The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog. — Michael Frayn

A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green. — Michael Frayn

No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes. — Michael Frayn

No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here ... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am. — Michael Frayn

We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within them. Beyond the light of one's own personal experience-darkness. What are people thinking? What are they feeling? How do they behave? Messages of reassurance or exhortation come through. One reads between the lines. Friends pool their knowledge. But in general we live like animals, in ignorance of the world around us. — Michael Frayn

And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world. — Michael Frayn

Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door ... — Michael Frayn

For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him. — Michael Frayn

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell. — Michael Frayn

Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all. — Michael Frayn

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success, then that's your bad luck. — Michael Frayn

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous ... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky. — Michael Frayn

It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else. — Michael Frayn

I haven't come to the theater to hear about other people's probelms. I've come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again. — Michael Frayn

Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world? — Michael Frayn

Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water — Michael Frayn

Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me. — Michael Frayn

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless. — Michael Frayn

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened. — Michael Frayn

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong. — Michael Frayn

Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture. — Michael Frayn

And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes. It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna. — Michael Frayn

The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassing familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything before me - all of the frightening, half-understood promises of life. — Michael Frayn

Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily. — Michael Frayn

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed. — Michael Frayn

Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums — Michael Frayn

Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them. — Michael Frayn

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now. — Michael Frayn

Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not. — Michael Frayn

A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child's hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult's hand and imagination to grasp. — Michael Frayn

I feel bad that I don't feel worse. — Michael Frayn

He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed. — Michael Frayn

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems. — Michael Frayn

But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us. — Michael Frayn

Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life. — Michael Frayn

You've got ten fingers,' said Morris. 'Why not stick them in ten pies? — Michael Frayn

I've never written a fiction before about real people ... I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN]. — Michael Frayn

Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life's over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we're gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children's children. — Michael Frayn

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed. — Michael Frayn

Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities ...
Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics. — Michael Frayn

..deceivers must expect to be deceived. — Michael Frayn