Quotes from A. A. Gill

Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we already secretly know that it doesn't do what it promises. Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage at the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash.

To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.

It is impossible to be taken seriously in shorts. No one has ever cared about anything said by a man in shorts.

Personal adornment is the only cultural form that everybody in the world takes part in.

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.

I don't have prejudices against anybody. I have opinions, based on a lifetime's experience.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It's among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.

You don't have a choice about fashion or aesthetics - you're in it, whether you like it or not.

Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.

Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.

Boredom is not a thing. It's not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things and conditions.

When Americans come to London they usually say how much they love the history, the tradition, the splendid tumpty-tum of things whose very repetition has become their point.

I'm terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.

Have you noticed that almost all the change in the world goes to women? When was the last time you had a five pence piece? Exactly. In a Christmas pudding. All the rest of it is in women's handbags.

Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left in the world. He would win an election in any one of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity.

There's no pleasing the British, or winning their favor. They simply hate politicians. All politicians. Hatred goes with politicians like mint sauce with lamb. It's as old as Parliaments.

We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colours of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck.

Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.

You see, the problem with Dave Cameron is that people know who he is. The less people know about him, the more he's likely to get re-elected.

The problem with a man bag is that it's called a man bag.

So, being a good man is not an exam or a qualification, it changes, and it incorporates being a good friend, a good father, a good employee, a good boss, a good neighbour and a good citizen.

I can tell very quickly when people are lying.

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.