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Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Alan Bradley

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Alan Bradley
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 10
Novelist
Writer
City of Toronto
Firsts
Whenever
Looks
Sky
First
Rate
Asterisk
Think
Doors
Fling
Thinking
Arms
Gaze
Like
Back
Wanting
Find
Throw
Look
Legs

More quotes by Alan Bradley

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I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.
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The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.
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I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.
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Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death lived for death lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.
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Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.
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I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.
Alan Bradley
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My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.
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What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.
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It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.
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If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.
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During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
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Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.
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As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No ... eight days a week.
Alan Bradley
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One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.
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Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.
Alan Bradley
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Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
Alan Bradley
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TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.
Alan Bradley
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I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
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Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!
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Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.
Alan Bradley