J. Davidson - Planet Word

‘Nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office’ibid.

‘Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it’William Goldman, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I was walking on 47th Street in New York — the diamond district’ibid.

‘Is it safe?’William Goldman, Marathon Man, Paramount Pictures, 1976

‘There’s no logic to it’William Goldman, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘disappeared off with the Indians’ibid.

‘But who knows, if we’d had McQueen, if it would have been different’ibid.

‘When I tried to sell the movie’ibid.

‘I’m gonna say something stupid’ibid.

‘just to let themselves go and swim into it’ibid.

‘I didn’t know Joyce, I didn’t know his wife Nora’David Norris, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Few writers have had more grace and splendour in the way they write’ibid.

‘ “Good day’s work, Joyce?” said Budgen’ibid.

‘Every kind of Dublin saying, like “the sock whiskey” for sore legs, for instance, is in it’ibid.

‘Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish’James Joyce, Ulysses , Penguin Classics, new edition, 2000

‘My soul frets in the shadow of his language’James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, new edition, May 1992

‘I have no language now, Sheila’David Norris, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘We tend to be a bit subversive’ibid.

‘I would say the greatness of Yeats’Declan Kiberd, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘And for me that’s the magnificence of Yeats’ibid.

‘We wouldn’t be here today in a Senate of an independent Ireland’ibid.

‘I have met them at close of day’W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916 — WB Yeats Selected Poems , Penguin Classics, reissued 2000

‘Sure, but you have to tell us a story in return’Declan Kiberd, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘You make your destitution sumptuous’ibid.

‘In the last ditch, all we can do is sing’Samuel Becket as quoted by Barry McGovern, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Absolutely terrifying … Apart from it being so famous’Simon Russell Beale, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I get the sense that it was a radical exploration of a single human soul’ibid.

‘It really does yield extraordinary riches’ibid.

‘Utterly terrifying, poleaxing with fear’David Tennant, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I saw him at that very formative age’ibid.

‘like keeping goal for Scotland’ibid.

‘And you think, please Lord, let me just remember the lines’ibid.

‘I can be bounded in a nutshell’William Shakespeare, Hamlet , 2:2, 254–6, Penguin Classics, new edition, January 2007

‘You just get the sense that he hasn’t slept for days’David Tennant, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘honey-heavy dew of slumber’William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1:1, 230, Wordsworth Editions, 1992

‘sore labour’s bath’William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2:2, 35–6, Penguin Classics, new edition, 2007

‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him’William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5:1, 185, Penguin Classics, new edition, 2007

‘I think the Yorick moment is much more specific’David Tennant, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘The first few performances holding a real human head’ibid.

‘like it was some big oak tree’Mark Rylance, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘ “It’s you who are alive now.” ’ibid.

‘In Pittsburgh there was a little old lady’ibid.

‘Till then, sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise’William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1:2, 256–7, Penguin Classics, new edition, January 2007

‘I remember performing the play out at Broadmoor special hospital’Mark Rylance, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1, 56–88 Penguin Classics, new edition, January 2007

‘I think poetry is to be distinguished always from prose.’Christopher Ricks and Stephen Fry, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’W. H. Auden, ‘Funeral Blues’, Collected Poems , Faber & Faber, Copyright © 1976, 1991, 2007 The Estate of W. H. Auden

‘Tragically in my life, in every film I’ve ever done’Richard Curtis, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Every day I think of that line from “The Boxer’ibid.

‘If you pick up a poem for the first time you have to piece it together’ibid.

‘I think there was a six-month period in which I understood it’ibid.

‘music is auditory cheesecake’Professor Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works , Penguin Allen Lane, 1998

‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’Mars, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, 1965

‘Now hands that do dishes …with mild green Fairy Liquid’Fairy Liquid advertising campaign, 1961

‘Just do it’Nike, Wieden and Kennedy, 1988

‘Most excellent and proved Dentifrice’ London Gazette , 1660, quoted by Gillian Dyer, Advertising as Communication , Routledge, new edition, 1982

‘Promise, large Promise, is the soul of an Advertisement’Dr Samuel Johnson, The Idler, The Universals Chronicle, 1759 edition

‘It won’t be long till Leo Burnett is selling apples’quoted in The Apple Story, leoburnett.co.in

‘They’re GR-R-R-E-A-T’Kellogg’s Frosties advertising campaign, Leo Burnett, 1952

‘Words are tremendously important in advertising’Don Bowen, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘We pluck the lemon; you get the plums’Volkswagen advertising campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1960

‘We’re only Number 2. We try harder’Avis advertising campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1962

‘Probably the best lager in the world’Carlsberg advertising campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi, 1973

‘Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’Heineken advertising campaign, Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners, 1974

‘Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it’Thomas Cook advertising campaign, Wells, Rich, Greene, 1984

‘English is a particularly good language for being able to play gags’Don Bowen, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum’Rowntree’s Fruit Gums advertising campaign, 1958

‘Beanz Means Heinz’Heinz advertising campaign, Young & Rubicam, 1967