Quotes by Jonathan Miller

“I wasnt driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.”

“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. Thats what their substance is.”

“Im not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.”

“Falling ill is not something that happens to us, it is a choice we make as a result of things happening to us”

“Humor is vague, runaway stuff that hisses around the fissures and crevices of the mind, like some sort of loose physic gas”

“Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. Youre doing the same thing: Youre reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, thats exactly like people I know.”

“Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors”

“Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.”

“The foyer at Covent Garden looks like Harrods food hall has offered up its dead”

“It is only right that we help provide financial security for the families of those brave men and women who are providing for our nations security, ... Thats what the Military Families Bill of Rights is all about.”

[On David Hume]Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.

In North America there is the general belief that everything can be fixed that life can be fixed up. In Europe the view is that a lot cant be fixed up and that living properly is not necessarily a question of mastering the technology so much as learning to live gracefully within the constraints that the species invents.

Im not really a Jew just Jew-ish not the whole hog.