Britain’s best one-liners, from Oxford’s 2013 edition

Modest about our national pride — and inordinately proud of our national modesty.

I always invest in companies an idiot could run, because one day one will.

I find it easy to portray businessmen. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I don’t work that way .... The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find completely amazing.

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

On nudity

The part never calls for it. And I’ve never, ever used that excuse. The box-office calls for it.

Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win.

I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

Sex has never been an obsession with me. It’s just like eating a bag of crisps. Quite nice, but nothing marvellous.

I don’t know what art is, but I do know what it isn’t. And it isn’t someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.

Wherever there is suffering, injustice and oppression the Americans will show up, six months late, and bomb the country next to where it is happening.

Good God! I have never drunk a vintage that started with the number two before!

I got into moisturiser when I played football. If you’re out in all weathers you have to take care of your face.

I treat opinion polls with a pinch of sugar.

The marvellous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.

There are moments when we in the British press can show extraordinary sensitivity; these moments usually coincide with the death of a proprietor, or a proprietor’s wife.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Of Camille Paglia

The ‘g’ is silent — the only thing about her that is.

The thing about high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.

Shut up Arnold [Wesker] or I’ll direct this play the way you wrote it.

According to legend. Telford is so dull that the by-pass was built before the town.

The green belt was a Labour idea and we are determined to build on it.

I don’t have time to sit down and write. When I think of a melody I call my answering machine and sing it.

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn’t seem to understand the concept of commercial success, then that’s your bad luck.

They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

Garter, darling, can’t you be just a little more elastic?

I wouldn’t say I was the best manager. But I was in the top one.

On Nick CleggLike some cut-price edition of David Cameron hastily knocked off by a Shanghai sweatshop to satisfy unexpected market demand.

If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.

It’s important to realise that I was actually black before the election.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can’t make your children carry.