Bristol Quotes

I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.

I studied politics and economics at Bristol, and people always assumed that I’d go into politics or a non-government organisation when I left. I might well do this later on. I’d love to represent a West Country seat in the House of Commons.

My son is a lecturer at Bristol University in anthropology. His degree was in, get this, human mating strategies – sex!

I love Parisian hotels. I usually stay in either Le Bristol, which is gorgeous, or Hotel Paris Rivoli, which is very French and feels like a step back in time. I also love the luxury of Waldorf Astoria hotels.

The standard Bristol set at being a mother is high for a woman to have to step into. She, as a mom, is crushing it.

I travel a lot with work… to and from Cornwall and Bristol, so I find myself on lots of trains.

We are a rugby family really. My dad and both granddads played rugby. Dad was good, on his way to Bath until he broke his leg. My brother Harry got an invitation to go and play for Bristol. I go and watch Sale Sharks and have been to Twickenham a few times.

The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.

When someone tells me they’ve never been to a race, I tell them that the first one they should go to is Bristol, Tennesee. The shape of the track, the energy, and excitement under the lights is similar to what you might get at a stick-and-ball game in college football or the NFL.

If I’d lived in Bristol, I’d probably be doing building site stuff, plastering. Probably not the plastering. It would have been mixing. I could always get work from friends who did construction. But I wasn’t into getting up at seven in the morning.

I do speak to a few people in non-league. There are a few people in Bristol where my family is based that I used to play with at Yate.

My fans are great and amazing, but there’s no way all of my fans are going to be able to fill up Bristol Motor Speedway.

I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper… it’s a disaster.

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker‘s assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

That’s how I lived for 10 years in Bristol after graduating. I just stayed in my student flat and paid very little rent. It was lovely, and part of me still misses that very lazy lifestyle. I was known as the magician on the street, and I used to dress a little eccentrically in a cloak.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

John Cleese was a big hero of mine. He grew up in Weston Super Mare near Bristol where I grew up; he was always very tall and gangly, but he was smart and used his physicality in a very funny way. I used to think, ‘Well he came from Weston and he did it, so there’s a chance for me.’

The tides which flow and lapse in the Bristol Channel are often distained by the freshets of many streams falling through wooded coombes below the moor.

For 10 years while I was at ESPN, I lived at the Residence Inn in Southington, Connecticut, near Bristol. I did that because my wife had a great job in New York City, and we had a place in New York City, at 54th and 8th. On Friday, I would come back, and then on Sunday evening I would go back to the Residence Inn.

It’s funny because when you’re a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you’re English. You can never win.

For me, the dilemma is I love Bristol, but you can only do that for so long and not get it back. It’s been something that’s been hard for me to accept. It breaks my heart.

I was never part of the Bristol scene. My sound was a Knowle West sound. Massive Attack wouldn’t come to my area because they know they’d have got beaten up there.

When I left Bristol City for Palace, I just wanted to be playing football. I didn’t care about the money I was getting or anything. I just wanted to play because I’ve always been like that, that’s just my character.

I had a complicated life until I was 25. I was born in Bristol and was brought up by my mum and my stepfather in Edinburgh. He introduced me to books.

In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students‘ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.

‘Skins‘ is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it’s all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it’s a good show because it’s come from a very real place, and there’s a lot of young people involved in the writing.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of ‘The Birthday Party‘ at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

I will tell you, I don’t miss me and Bristol fighting, but coming home to an empty house every other week, you walk in there, and it’s a reminder of the failure of the marriage.

I’d love to be part Apache Indian. But I’m from Bristol. No Apaches there mate.

The game shapes you. I played for 20 years at all levels, apart from the Premier League. I had a disaster at Bristol City, where in two years I learnt more about myself, the industry, fans, how you get treated, than I ever learnt in my career.