Quotes from A.A. Gill

Nobody knows exactly where the first chickens were domesticated – India, China, Thailand, Vietnam – somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which is to say at the birth of farming. The wild bird is a red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus (the French made it their national bird because of the similarity to Gaul, and because they still behave like chickens).

Trojan is giving away Magnum large condoms (do you think they were named after a large wooden animal inside which thousands of little men were hiding, ready to jump out and ruin your life?)

Ronald Reagan was a man who knew the diplomatic form. He also had a showman's ear for a tune. So when, at an official dinner, the marine band slipped into 'Edelweiss', he stopped mid-anecdote, rose to his feet, placed a reverential hand over his heart and stared into the blank mid-distance out of respect for the Austrian national anthem.

ochre sliver of paper from the Detroit Post. His story goes from

Islands prove, I think, that geography makes people what they are.

he too went bonkers, probably due to the mercury used in preparing top hats—hence "as mad as a hatter.

You wouldn't know it had claimed so many hopeful, thrashing, gasping lives, but that's the thing with the sea, it never looks guilty.

You see refugees as the problem. They aren't. They are a symptom. You see them in our fields as weeds, invasive species, but you never ask, what is a weed, but a flower in the wrong garden? That is the real problem with Lebanon, and the whole Middle East, we are all flowers in the wrong garden. You English should understand this; this is the garden you planted.

Philanthropy was rediscovered in America. There is a particular relationship with charity that is unlike the stealthy, apologetic palming of donations from the Old World,

A bar girl in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad who asked to see my passport and held it to her nose; closing her eyes she sighed, 'Ah, the smell of freedom.

There is a duty to improve the lot of others. Charity isn't personal, it's public. It's owed not just to God and salvation but to the nation: the idea that America itself deserves its citizens' charity, not because it is poor but because it could always be richer.

Of course, only Americans can name a shop In-n-Out Burger without collapsing into a heap of dirty sniggers. You know the difference between them and us? To us, a double entendre means only one thing; to them, it means absolutely nothing.

Gobbledygook could be a word invented by God to describe speaking in tongues.

more often than not, an exhibition is merely a misplaced object.

There are celebrities in New York that no one's heard of in New Jersey. It is interested and influenced by itself.

In the nineteenth century, one in three British soldiers was an Irishman.

Taxidermy inhabits a half-life, an underpass between life and death. He is oddly vital, still possessed of an animating force, not as defunct as a corpse yet still nowhere near living. A talisman trapped between escape and dust.

Top hats in Paris and London were paid for with genocide along the Great Lakes of the wilderness.

The name skyscraper is originally nautical. Skyscraper is the tiny, triangular sail flown from the top of the mast.

It's all too easy to sneer at war tourism. Appending the word 'tourism' to any activity diminishes it, makes it ersatz, collective, prearranged. But the desire to make travelling more than a purely hedonistic or childish experience in search of warmth and food is a good thing, and the desire to understand the struggles of nations and the deaths of youths on their behalf must be important.

It was one thing not taking an old bitterness to a new country. It was another to actually pay to send back Libyan Semtex to blow up my home.

The stands of aspen up here are the biggest living thing on the planet—who'd have thought? Acres of aspen share the same underground artery and vein system, their DNA identical. Branches of this lollygagging übervegetable are all rooted as one.

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.