Keith Waterhouse

Keith Spencer Waterhouse (6 February 1929 – 4 September 2009) was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. His first novel, Billy Liar, has been adapted into a play, a musical, a film, and a television sitcom.

Quotes

• Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia.
  • Billy Liar (1959), ch. 1

• "I turn over a new leaf every day," I said. "But the blots show through."
  • Billy Liar, ch. 11

• [There's] too many people making too much muck and too much noise with too little space to do it in.
  • The Daily Mirror, August 17, 1970, cited from Mondays, Thursdays (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), pp. 168-169

• Now, […] the world is beginning to look like what it is—overcrowded, dirty, noisy, smelly, and rapidly running out of resources. We're nearing the end of the rainbow, with not a crock of gold in sight.
  • Ibid.

• The 50s face was angry, the 60s face was well-fed, the 70s face was foxy. Perhaps it was the right expression: there was a lot to be wary about.
  • The Observer Magazine, December 30, 1979

• Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?
  • Bookends (1990), cited from Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell; Mr. And Mrs. Nobody; and, Bookends (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) p. 135

• Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?"
  • The Spectator, January 15, 1994

External links

• Keith Waterhouse at IMDb