YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Higgins

lines on the record
27
first
2006-03-05
most recent
2006-03-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yes, you could probably spend a lot of time trying to make it work, but not me. I'm the least technical person in the world.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I would say well really it's the only reason I would want to would be on the level of being able to say is there anybody out there, you know? I can't really think of anything more than that.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “What I was going to say as times have moved on, and mobile phone at so much part of Elizabeth, I would like a mobile phone. If you say well you can't have a mobile phone”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, being practical, I should also ask for the complete works of Charles Dickens. My God, that would keep me going, and I've always been a great Dick in its fan.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I adore all this music, and two years ago we did a show at the Jersey Opera House for a couple of weeks. Every woman in the club wanted to be in it and wonderful dresses, and the men in black tie. And it was so marvellous the whole audience applauded, and it broke into It's heartbreaking actually let's face the music and dance and it was so fantastic and also to me it's kind of An anthem, really, there may be trouble ahead, but while there's moonlight and music and love and romance, let's face the music and dance, and that's the way to look at it, folks.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Because in some aspects of your life Things like divorce and things like marriage breakdown and that kind of thing. I'm a gloomy Orange Protestant Presbyterian from Northern Ireland there knew what I mean. Somehow takes life too seriously and constantly queries what you're doing and what you're achieving. I've lived for what is it three quarters for a century. And There are bound to have been things in your life where you're travelling hopefully, and then it goes deaf. and may be you're responsible for the things going wrong in your life or for relationships going wrong. But I don't want that sound too damby. I really mean that. And that's... Why, I'm finishing on an extremely hard. Which was another Fred Astair Let's Face the music and dance”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think you're always slightly feeling going to fall off. I'm very lucky In with my partner at the this stage of my life we've so much in common. That does mean a great deal to me.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Probably Now why have I selected Rod Stewart sailing? Well there's a good reason for that which is that some years ago I wrote a play and it was called Walking Wounded and it was set in a rehabilitation unit in Britain after the Falklands and it's essentially my Hymn two soldiers and I have an enormous respect for soldiers. As an old soldier myself, but for men I've known who've been through far worse things than me. What I remember is my friend and others said, you know, when we were all going down on the big boat. The QE too, and so on. It became a kind of anom to the soldiers sailing. They used to sing it.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “For years everything had to be done while you were doing something else to earn a living and put bread on the table and pay the rent. So, in other words my hobby, if you like, looked it that way, was this writing. and churning out all these books and so on. And the result is that you get to obviously a certain stage in life. Most people will be retired anyway. But if you've never been used to doing that and feel no desire to do it, It's just that I'm rather old to be doing it”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The interesting thing about it there are two things number one it was the last film reader ever made. The other great thing about it was in this Mexican village the people haven't been married or baptized or anything like that for years and they all beg him to do this and there's this wonderful middle of the film where this marvelous mass is played and against the chorus the camera keeps fading and coming and on Mitcham marrying people, baptizing babies and so on and then it's so moving it ends up at the end where everybody's gone and he's sitting there in one of the pews and he's rumpled clothes and he looks up and he says But who will forgive me?”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I wrote a book called The Wrath of God. and we sold the film rights to MGM. The famous award winning director Ralph Nelson, they had Robert Metcham playing this In 1920s Mexico, and it also had amazingly for me as a great film before my life Rita Hayworth.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Following Eagle has landed, I really was number one in the world really genuinely it was get over to Hollywood. It was stretch limpos, it was stay at the Beverly Hills, and that's the kind of thing where relationships erode, not in a nasty way or anything like that, but it's just a kind of Osbose is, its thing seeping through, and in the end, oh well, I can't really go on here, you know, etc.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, you have I know this sounds a bit downbeat, and I'm not feeling particularly downbeat, but the character where I say he'd one of those days the man who had everything. And then for Sir Richard had nothing, you see, and it can often be one of the consequences of great success, that kind of thing. Well, it requires adjustment to handle it all, and you've got to remember that You can become a huge success. What effect does that have on the partner in your life, on your wife? What effects is it going to have on your children? Because one has to remember, especially in the years”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “No, a lot of people look bones as being a bit eccentric. I mean, I don't drive around in a Rolls Royce or any kind of fancy motor. I don't really see the point of on a small island, you know the having thing, it's as if what you're doing is for show, trying to make a statement or whatever.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The thing about Le Pastor by Grovele, which of course means the shepherd, it's a beautiful small piano piece. I should point out that my eldest daughter from a very early age exhibited huge talent for the piano. But I remember her playing this piece when she did grade five or something, the Royal College of Music and got a distinction with it.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “That's right. And what I did, I took it all on board and I wrote a book called East of Desolation. When I sent it and the agent said straightaway this is far superior to anything you've done before but this is so different we want to start again so sorry stop being Harry Patterson and let's have another name and that's where the Jack Higgins came from”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And he said, The trouble with thriller writers, he said, it seems to me you work everything out beforehand, and then you make people act it all out like a script. And he said, real life isn't like that. He said, people make the script in real life. How they behave, how they behave under stress, or are they good or are they bad or whatever? And he said, so really all you ought to need is just an idea for a story. And I was quite thought this is so simple, really. Maybe I've been missing out all these years, carefully constructing these plots and things.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well I decided that things weren't going totally in the way. I thought they should, and I met one of my old school teachers, who was and by this stage had become a senior lecturer at university, which is a very respectable thing to be and very well paid. And I met him one day in the precinct in Leeds, and he said, Oh, I'm very proud of you, you know, used to be in my former school and so on at elementary school, and he said, Well, the only thing I'll say to you is I've read your books because you wrote them.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Because I was too prolific, and if publishers doing one book, in a particular year if you've turned out two more or more As far as Holmes publishes are concerned, you've got to wait till next year, and the year after that. Well, that was no good to me because the kind of money I was earning wasn't huge money or anything. I was trying to make a living.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh the grand march from Aida That just takes me back to that period of being in the household cavalry in what's now the Blues and Royals in my day it was just the blues I wouldn't have bissed it for anything. But this is the Grand March, the march past. of the regim”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “By night you wrote, didn't you? Yes. You couldn't stop. The blunt truth was I found my metier there, and by then I'd become much more skilled at writing, and then I wrote two or three books, and one of the books two of them got turned down, but one of them got picked up and it became the first book I had published. It was a book called Sadwin from Sea, which came out as an adventure thriller. I can tell you what I got for it, by the way, the advance of This was a book, a whole book was seventy five pounds.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yes, it was always a great estate, and then jumping over various jobs, I ended up as a civil servant and quite a decent salaried position. And I done a lot of you know, I'd got matriculation in the evenings from LSE, and I'd got A levels and things like that. And it was Jess that settled, I thought. Well here you are, you kind of about twenty seconds your life's getting nowhere. And there was such a shortage of teachers that you offered these grants. And I thought, well, I might as well have a go at”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “He simply didn't want me around. It wasn't a good experience at all. It was the worst kind of feeling you get in a situation like that, which is not abuse or physical abuse or whatever. It's just this heavy feeling of knowing that you're not wanted. It was just a big feeling that you didn't fit in.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Fogg Right. It's a particular resonance for me for two reasons. First of all, when I went to do national service and I was posted to household cavalry, you must realise that for a lad from Leeds this was a terribly exotic thing to happen because the households were full of toffs doing there and National service, and you would be in a bed next to Viscount somebody, and on the other side would be the honourable somebody else, but also for someone who'd never been to London and this kind of thing. I used to walk for miles, just taking everything in and thoroughly enjoying it. And that therefore brings back that period of my life when that was happening such a big way, having such an effect on me, means a great deal to me. Fred is there doing this one.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Well, it is. But there's another aspect to it. You should be very friendly with the Great Yorkshire writer called John Brain. And remember John saying to me once, he said in some ways the terrible thing about being a writer, he said Even if your father was dying in bed and you'd sit on the bed to hold his hand, he said there's part of you that's thinking I can use this So it's always there.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And the editing, if I can quickly say that used to have a nose days, was with the terrible sectarian hatred. You had the differing sides evicting people from their area, and I can remember as a child then standing at the corner at night and seeing torch like processions, and there would be if it was a Protestant area, there would be poor wretched Catholics with all the belongings and prams and things. Being told to get out of town. It's not If you witness that as a young boy, elsewhere would things reversed, with Protestants being told to get out. You see”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, I lived in the Shankle, I went to school there, but in Ireland thing about it was nineteen thirty eight, the IRA declared war on Britain again, and they started bombing, and I went out with my step grandfather one night, and I was out with him for some reason, and of course I was only about nine, eight or nine, and all of a sudden as it turned out later, an Iman threw a mills bomb, which is a pineapple grenade into the crowd. My sacrum father, who was a World War I veteran of the trenches and so on, he grabbed me kind of almost on his shoulder, and he ran like hell down the street, and that was it. And I think if I inhale now I can smell the cordite and what it was like.”

    2006-03-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jack Higgins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source