172 Quotes by Jeremy Clarkson

Column writing is like gas – it fills the available space.

I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.

This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.

This is the Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that that’s much to shout about. That’s like saying “Ooh good I’ve got syphilis, the BEST of the sexually transmitted diseases.”

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

I am aware, of course, that many men do hate the sight of their wife and children. Doctors even have a name for these people: ‘anglers’.

I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it’s flying; the next it’s tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face.

I rang up Jay Kay, who’s got one, and said: ‘Can we borrow yours?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, if I can borrow your daughter, because it amounts to the same thing.’

Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.