A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain.
A. A. Milne
The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
A. N. Wilson
Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.
A. S. Byatt
I was already in a band, and the teachers called my mum in and said: 'Abbey's so clever, it's a total waste if she follows her dream'. But I never wanted to do a job I didn't love, and I'd always wanted to be a model or an actress or a singer.
Abbey Clancy
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
DNA is a code of four letters; proteins are made up of amino acids which come in 20 forms. So the ribosome is a very clever machine that reads one language and operates in another.
Ada Yonath
The fact is I'm choosy, but mainly about a man's character. He has to be interesting, funny and clever. I don't even mind if he's not very good-looking.
Agyness Deyn
There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.
Al Yankovic
From sublime affairs of state to the stark and vulgar popular culture of our own contemporary lives, let's make this descent into the lower registers together and recognize the good, nasty fun of 'Gone Girl,' Chicago writer Gillian Flynn's novel about the mysterious disappearance of a clever and deceptive young Midwestern housewife.
Alan Cheuse
Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.
Alan Moore
I've always felt that improv looks and feels more clever when you're there to experience it live than when you have the degree of separation that television creates. Television raises expectations.
Alan Thicke
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Albert Schweitzer
Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
Aleister Crowley
What really destroyed Tucker Carlson, respected magazine journalist, was TV. TV exposed him as glib, smug, and not nearly as clever as he thought he was.
Alex Pareene
I love Simone Rocha. I just think she's really clever.
Alexa Chung
Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'
Ali Smith
Whenever I've chosen a song because it's clever, it's always turned out to be a mistake.
Alison Krauss
Unless it's something very clever like 'Memento,' most independent films have a very tough life out there.
Allison Anders
I would like to say a few things about that photo in 'Tatler'. I have no regrets. The article was about the 20 cleverest people in England, covered up only by the thing that makes them clever. A saxophonist, for example, had only his saxophone, and an artist, his easel. So I was covered by books.
Amanda Foreman
Everybody's constantly growing. In your twenties, you can learn a lot, and you can be very smart and clever and savvy. Especially these kids today. They seem like they have it all together. But let's talk to them again when they're 40 years old and see really who they are. Is it who they thought they were at 25?
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
It so depends on each script, because you can say... I always thought I wouldn't have wanted to do something that was kind of like as big and commercial as 'The Dark is Rising,' but I really liked the script. I thought it was really clever.
If I hadn't gone towards boxing, I might have been one of those kids getting into trouble. A lot of my friends did. They were clever kids at school, but they just went down the wrong path.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
I was always behind in class. There was people in my class who was amazing at art, amazing at maths, amazing at English, but I wasn't clever with anything, even though I tried my hardest.
I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
The push to defund public schools and reroute taxpayer money to charters and private institutions is actually a very clever strategy by the Right Wing, which has always had a great deal of disdain for a system that forces them to pay taxes toward some other kid's non-religious, science-based education.
I think I'm quite a clever player and that I realise there are times when I can be offensive but others when I must be more compact and work for the team, because that is what matters.
I don't like being called 'macho.' Macho basically means stupid and a real Italian man is not macho, he's smart. That's smart in both senses: elegant and clever.
In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.
Tiptoeing on a tightrope past insider trading laws may be deft and clever, but it doesn't make it right.
Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.
The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. It's a nice problem to have.
The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
When I first started writing comics, in the way-back days, Typhoid Mary was my explosive response to women characters in comics - I made her an innocent virginal type, a clever, dark, liberated woman, and as Bloody Mary, a feminist bent of punishing men - all in one character. She was an instinctual rather than a calculated creation.
'The Others' books take place in an alternate Earth where the Earth natives have been the dominant predators throughout the world's history, and humans are nowhere near the top of the food chain. But humans are clever and resilient, if not always wise, and have made some bargains with the Others in order to survive.
I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
I think it's such a clever idea, that you fall in love when you're 16, and then you have this fantasy about that person for the rest of your life.
We never wanted to move to a niche slot at 11 at night so that we could be a lot cleverer and bluer. We just want to do those big light-entertainment shows we loved as kids.
I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.
I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!
The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.
Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.
It's up to me to use my brain, be clever, find the pockets of space, and get on the ball.
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They're my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He's just really cool.
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
You just have to be clever about who you work with. Had I done Gap or H&M, there's no way Louis Vuitton would have wanted to work with me. So you hold out for the big ones.
