40 Quotes by Toby Young

I wouldn’t describe myself as a master of anything.

My life’s ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I’m just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn’t rung.

You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone’s laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they’re all laughing at you?

I’ve never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate – my father had undergone Freudian analysis – and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

I was once hired to write a column for ‘The Guardian’ and then got fired before I’d submitted my first one. That was unusual. Most newspapers wait until I’ve written at least one piece for them before firing me.

The moment I’m perceived to be even a tiny bit successful, my career will go down the pan.

I’ve become a professional failure – in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person’s life chances, so we’re less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it’s much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

There’s no reason why you can’t deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.