Top 35 Bristol Quotes

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.’

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.

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.

I just felt that I might to go to university and get some real life. It wasn’t stimulating in the same way. I loved being at Bristol, but I missed the thrill of being on set.

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.

When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.

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.

I never thought I would ever win a Daytona 500. I never thought we would sweep Bristol. I just never thought any of that stuff was going to happen or be possible.

I got a job right out of drama school as assistant stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic. I’ve been lucky enough to stay in work ever since.

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.

I was effectively unemployed after my son was born. I resigned from Bristol because I wasn’t happy with the way my career was going then discovered I was pregnant when I was out of a job, but I was freelancing.

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.

Drama at Bristol was an academic course: you were judged on your A-levels, and there were no auditions. I did a BA General degree.

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 lot of tough experiences at Bristol City. I came there for a few quid and was getting booed off by fans, got injured. I was out of the team due to injury but also because I was having an awful time playing wise. But they were amazing experiences.

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.

I think Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be a good chap to have supper with. Anyone who builds a railway and then builds a steamship when he gets to Bristol and can’t go any further must be a good chap.

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

There are wonderful things happening all around the world. From Nova Scotia to Kerala, Bristol to Melbourne, and even in the Philippines, zero waste is on the agenda. I think what’s particularly inspiring is when communities don’t wait to be told what to do but just go ahead and do it.

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things – teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

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

As soon as I stepped into Bristol City, I felt like I was really welcomed very well, and I felt that from the very beginning.

Every year, tens of millions of salmon return to the pristine shores of Bristol Bay in Alaska. They linger in the bay’s cool, shallow waters before charging up nearby streams to spawn and create another generation of wild salmon.

The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.

Both my parents are English and I was born in West Africa, and I moved around as a kid, lived in Bristol, lived in Buckinghamshire and Surrey as a kid, and then moved when I was 16.

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.

The photoshoot glitz and TV studio make-up isn’t the real me. I spend most days at home in Bristol in jeans and a T-shirt running around after the kids or shopping in the Co-op.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.