9 Quotes by Rodney Ulyate

You learn almost as much about a thinker from what he reads—in particular, what he likes and what he disdains—as from what he writes himself.

You don't know how shallow you are, or how narcissistic, until you acquire a facial scar. On the plus side, it's so situated as to make me look tough and worldly. On the downside, I'm never kissing my dog again.

Guantánamo Bay's motto: 'Safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.' Four adjectives describing one sick joke.

I don't often agree with me either; there's much, in fact, with which I disagree. But that's probably because I'm so dashed ingenious that I haven't a clue what I'm saying.

Political centrism ≠ neutrality. Being a centrist doesn't make you unbiased; it biases you in favour of the centre.

If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.

Would that cricketers had better lines, or at least that their most famous were not also their tritest or most banal. 'This thing can be done,' said Fred Spofforth in 1882. 'We'll get 'em in singles,' George Hirst did not say twenty years later. 'You guys are history,' growled Devon Malcolm in 1994. 'You've just dropped the World Cup,' Steve Waugh may have crowed in 1999. At least two of these could have been put into the mouth of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It may be true that we all have a novel inside of us. Better in than out in the present case. Burning Ashes appears to have been typed rather than written. If so, it was a great deal easier to type than it is to read. Its tone is vulgar; it lacks invention. It is designed to thrill the repressed and soothe the subliterate, and no doubt they will be thrilled and soothed. Nature, I fear, did not intend Ms Lewis-Foster to write.

In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord’s. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents.