Kyril Bonfiglioli > Quotes

“Bed is the only place for protracted telephoning. It is also execellently suited to reading, sleeping and listening to canaries. It is not a good place for sex: sex should take place in armchairs, or in bathrooms, or on lawns which have been brushed but not too recently mown, or on sandy beaches if you happen to have been circumcised. If you are too tired to have intercourse except in bed you are probably too tired anyway and should be husbanding your strength.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy

“It was still only nine o'clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen. ”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy

“I never think of policemen's wives; their beauty maddens me like wine.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli

“I very carefully levered up an eyelid and shut it again fast. A merciless sunbeam had squirted straight in, making my brain bleed.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli

“There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“My flight was announced by Donald Duck noises from a loudspeaker; I arose and shuffled off towards the statistical improbability of dying in an airplane crash. Personally, the thought of such a death appalls me little – what civilized man would not rather die like Icarus than be mangled to death on a Motorway by a Ford Popular?”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same price.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“We know that death is the only end of art. A chap who has gone to all the trouble of strangling his wife is entitled to his moment of splendour on the gallows – it is a crime to make him sew mailbags like a common thief.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’ ‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“toward the end she was she was wearing nothing but seven beads, four of them sweat”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“Have you ever been a member of the Communist or Anarchist parties, Mr Mortdecai?’ ‘Good Lord no!’ I cried gaily, ‘filthy capitalist, me. Grind the workers’ faces, I say.’ ‘When you were at school?’ he prompted gently. ‘Oh. Well, yes, I think I did take the Red side in the debating society at school once or twice. But in the Lower Sixth we all got either religion or Communism – it goes with acne you know. Vanishes as soon as you have proper sexual intercourse.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“Karl Popper urges us to be constantly on our guard against the fashionable disease of our time: the assumption that things cannot be taken at their face value, that an apparent syllogism must be the rationale of an irrational motive, that a human avowal must conceal some self-seeking baseness. (Freud assures us that Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a homosexual symbol, his upward-pointing index finger seeking to penetrate the fundament of the universe; art historians know that it is a centuries-old cliché of Christian iconography.)”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“When depressed, go and find someone to salute you.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“How sharper than a serpent's tooth is an awakening without tea!”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“Some of my best friends are women,' I snapped, 'though I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to marry one of them.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“It all started – or at any rate the narrative I have to offer all started – at Easter last year: that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Something Nasty in the Woodshed

“Stiskl jsem zvonek, a když se objevil Jock, požádal jsem ho o kostku. Odpověděl, že nic takového doma nemáme a už nemá smysl pro nějakou posílat, protože každý slušný prodavač kostek už stáhl roletu a v zavřeném krámě se mucká s manželkou. A tak byla ta kostka, do níž jsem zestručnil a zaobalil svou odpověď v podobě NE, ryze abstraktní.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

“Jock byl vmžiku u mne a vnutil mi do ztuhlých prstů jednu ze svých proslulých brandy se sodou. (Tajemství proslulých Jockových brandy se sodou spočívá v tom, že je dělá bez sody; je to jednoduchý trik, který si každý snadno osvojí.)”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli

“How do you know I don’t take sugar?’ I asked rebelliously. ‘No gentleman takes sugar in black coffee. Besides, it’s bad for you.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, After You with the Pistol

“that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Something Nasty in the Woodshed

“Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“I ate a great quantity of turbot, some boiled mutton and a few nicely-dressed woodcocks, each set upon a toast which had been spread with the bird’s “trails”, peppered. “Trails” means guts. I also drank some wine.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, All the Tea in China

“Sleep is not, with me, a mere switching off: it is a very positive pleasure to be supped and savoured with expertise. It was a good night; sleep pampered me like a familiar, salty mistress who yet always has a new delight with which to surprise her jaded lover.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“At HQ, meantime, the Dispatcher of Inspectors is cackling hatefully as he cuddles his Bradshaw's Railway Guide, for the train the inspectors will catch at Victoria has a restaurant car but it is too late for what British Rail jestingly calls "breakfast" and too early for a life-giving drink. Heh, heh! At Eastbourne, they [the bank inspectors] stamp into the bank's Market Street branch, flourishing many a dread credential and reciting an Ogden Nash-like poem which goes after this fashion:
Keys,
Please.
Then they glance swiftly around to observe which cashier has gone green about the gills, which teller is slipping his pocket-money back into the petty-cash box and feeding the racing pages of the Daily Mirror into the shredding machine, which assistant manager is sidling out in the general direction of Gatwick Airport.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

“(Pouting is one of those dying arts; Mrs Spon can do it, so can the boy who creates my shirts, but it’s almost as rare nowadays as tittering and sniggering.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, After You with the Pistol

“she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point that Thing at Me

“Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“You see, we anti-feminists don’t dislike women in the least; we prize, cherish, and pity them. We are compassionate. Goodness, to think of the poor wretches having to waddle through life with all those absurd fatty appendages sticking out of them; to have all the useful part of their lives made miserable by the triple plague of constipation, menstruation and parturition; worst of all, to have to cope with these handicaps with only a kind of fuzzy half-brain – a pretty head randomly filled, like a tiddly-winks cup, with brightly-coloured scraps of rubbish – why, it wrings the very heart with pity. You know how your dog sometimes gazes anguishedly at you, its almost human eyes yearning to understand, longing to communicate? You remember how often you have felt that it was on the very brink of breaking through the barrier and joining you? I think that’s why you and I are so kind to women, bless ’em.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli

“Martland paused in his narrative and I did not urge him on, for this was very bad news, for when millionaires go mad poorer people get hurt.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me

“Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun.”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me