Quotes from A.A. Gill

in the Edwardian way of things, collected indiscriminately and rigorously, with the global kleptomania of empire and the desire to own, calibrate, measure and stuff everything possible, to put all of creation into its place, and place as much of it as possible in glass cases.

Cannibalism is a Western, white imposition. A retrospective racism. Tribal memory, collective dreams and wishful thinking should, if not silence, then at least reduce to a tearful academic whisper any attempt to discredit the lives of Indians. Haven't they suffered enough?

The Swiss—also a federation of semi-independent states—are even more attached to their guns than Texans, and they have a greater number per capita, but death by shooting is so rare they don't even collate the figures.

deaths by bullet per 100,000. In at number one is Colombia, with a whopping 51.8 whacks. Next is Paraguay with 7.4, then Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Costa Rica, Belarus, Barbados, and the United States with 2.97—just ahead of Uruguay.

There is a name for this sudden slap of art, this falling through the rabbit hole of civilisation. It's Stendhal's syndrome: being overcome by beauty. They say that the guards in the Uffizi are trained to deal with collapsing Americans who have lived lives of blameless comfort in Midwestern ugliness and can't compute the full beam of a Bronzino.

New York bakes in a cess of gritty fug all summer, and congeals into gray slush all winter. There are a couple of days in the spring and autumn when the sky is madonna blue, the air crisp, and the light bright and sparkling, and that's when they take the pictures and make the romantic comedies.

The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie's warning about wealth: 'There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

In America, immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation. But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere.

the anti-gun urban liberals are really not that much more evolved. They have an equal and opposite fanaticism about guns—that to own one is to be a latent murderer. But worse than that, it's to be tasteless. There is a raft of assumptions that go with gun ownership.

Guns are a trigger for a whole magazine of internal snobberies and prejudices that crackle through white European-American society. There is a salutary sentence for these two groups—the gun lobby and the urban liberal. They are two tribes tied together by guns.

Crack cocaine is the contemporary beaver, an international fad that has radically altered the economics of the poorest, marginal people, indigenous America. The gangs are the tribes of the New World.

a gun in a film is so culturally specific to America. It looks odd in world cinema unless it's ironic. I wonder if there are more balls in English films than guns, more nipples in French films. Guns in America's story are a constant, a plot device, like coffee cups in European films. Guns are Hollywood.

a German spy landing off the coast of Norfolk, walking into a village and banging on a pub door to ask in perfectly accented English for a glass of hard cider. The publican gave him a drink, made an excuse and went out the back to fetch the local policeman. The only person in Britain who didn't know you couldn't get alcohol at nine in the morning would be a German spy.

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage.

America is layered with the given graffiti, names of its generous dead. There isn't a museum or hospital, a theater or municipal amenity, however humble, that can't be blessed with the remembrance of the comfortably-off and defunct. The money left to Ivy League universities in America isn't about the needs of learning.

By 1927, only the richest 2 percent of Americans paid any federal tax at all.

Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills," laxatives that were 50 percent mercury. I think they were reusable: you swallowed one, suffered the violent scatological consequences, reclaimed the pill, washed it and saved it for the next poor sucker.

Tellingly, the department that deals with relations with the rest of the world doesn't have the word "foreign" in it: it is the State Department. It looks after the interests of one state alone. It might be called the Bargepole Department.

The best way to imagine how big the emptiness of nature is, is to jam it with humanity.

a tax on salt cod that precipitated the War of Independence.

Brains were being lured to California by mere money. Mere money and space, and sun, and steak, and Hollywood, and more money and opportunity and optimism and openness. All the Os but without one-upmanship. And there was ownership, and friendship, and a future. All inconsequential fripperies, according to the Old World: beads and mirrors. People who took the dollar in exchange for their brains were unpatriotic in much the same way that tax exiles were.

The one nation America has seemed to gain something of a special relationship with is Israel, the sliver of the Middle East that has no oil and little strategic importance.

It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on.

Accent is the last great redoubt of prejudice. The race relations industry, that inquisition of fairness and sensitivity, doesn't protect against discrimination by funny voice. You can mock an accent with impunity, and everyone does