96 Quotes by Mark Forsyth

Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.

If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.

If the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine as old as the fish, and the fish as young as the maid, and the maid as willing as the hostess, it would have been a very good meal.

Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.

The Latin for standing in front of things is pro-stitutio. It.

The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don’t believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.