Jeffrey Bernard Quotes

One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

Women should have labels on their foreheads saying, 'Government Health Warning: women can seriously damage your brains, genitals, current account, confidence, razor blades, and good standing among your friends'.

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.

I have stood in a bar in Lambourn and been offered, in the space of five minutes, a poached salmon, a leg of a horse, a free trip to Chantilly, marriage, a large unsolicited loan, ten tips for a ten-horse race, two second-hand cars, a fight, and the copyright to a dying jockey's life story.

The more necessary it becomes to stop drinking, the more impossible it becomes to stop.

Oh, to me not drinking is like being dead, almost. I sit here taking endless journeys down memory lane. It gets boring.

What a pity people don't take as much trouble with their own breeding as intelligent racehorse owners do. But then I suppose it is bordering on fascism to think like that.

My misdeeds are accidental happenings and merely the result of having been in the wrong bar or bed at the wrong time, say most days between midday and midnight.

It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that.

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation.

It's one thing to ask your bank manager for an overdraft to buy 500 begonias for the borders in Haslemere, but quite another to seek financial succour to avail oneself of the 5-2 they're offering on lie de Bourbon for the St Leger.

They smoke cigarettes professionally. The smoke is inhaled very sharply and the teeth are bared.Then the head turns to give you a profile and the smoke is exhaled slowly and deliberately and the grey jet stream becomes a beautiful blue cloud of smoke.What are they trying to tell us?

You never see a pretty, unattached girl on a racecourse. But you often see positive gangs of rather unpretty ones. They are the owners or the owners' wives and they wear mink in all weathers and far too much make-up. For some odd reason, I can never work out why they always seem to be married to haulage contractors in the North, builders in the South and farmers in the West.

In most betting shops you will see three windows marked 'Bet Here', but only one window with the legend 'Pay Out'.

When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

The only reason I would have liked to have gone to university is because I like cricket. Not a very good reason to want to go, but as good as any, I suppose.

There's nothing undignified about lying about all day and being waited on by servants, sipping bloody champagne.

But you've got to have money for comfort, which obviously doesn't matter as much when you're young, but even so. I always like to bloody eat well and be warm. Have a drink when I want it.

Oh, the self-importance of fading stars. Never mind, they will be black holes one day.

I don't remember ever being full of dislike and hatred for people, like some kids I've come across now.

A lot of girls annoy me who go to university - one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I've got to pay for that being an income tax payer.

Although I have to admit I have despised a couple of people simply because they have never had a job in their lives.

I enjoy doing nothing.

One of the things that goes with getting older is that one becomes more conservative - and I emphasise that when I use the word conservative I do not mean politically.