"I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.""If you're going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it's well furnished."
"Life is unfair but remember sometimes it is unfair in your favour."
"The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought."
"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done."
"The truth is an ambition which is beyond us."
"Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first."
"I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world."
To my eternal shame, I neglected to notice another significant centenary that came and went last Friday - that of the magnificent Sir Peter Ustinov!
Oscar-winning actor, filmmaker, memoirist, wit, author, director, playwright, chat-show favourite, polyglot, polymath - many are the epithets (and accolades) applicable to this marvellous man. As Brian MacFarlane described on the BFI Screenonline website:
"...if there is something of the Renaissance man about Ustinov (he is also a playwright, autobiographer, raconteur of one-man show proportions), there may also be something of the dilettante, as if he can't quite settle to anything because of all the conflicting claims on his darting imagination. The problem is that he does them all well."
The world will never see the like of him again.
Sir Peter Alexander von Ustinov CBE FRSA (16th April 1921 – 28th March 2004)
