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