Top 40 Tony Parsons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My principal motivation is supporting my family, which is not a bad reason for getting up in the morning. That’s always been my motivation – to take care of the people who rely on me.”

— Tony Parsons

2. “I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an excuse for some coward hiding behind a keyboard to bully someone else.”

— Tony Parsons

3. “Home is oneness, home is my original nature. It is right here, simply in what is. There is nowhere else I have to go, and nothing else I have to become.”

— Tony Parsons

4. “My parents have been dead for many years, and when your folks are gone there is nobody standing between you and eternity.”

— Tony Parsons

5. “Love means knowing when to let go.”

— Tony Parsons

6. “Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed – but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it.”

— Tony Parsons

7. “When you are a journalist in the music business, as I was, you end up dying or going to the gym – I chose the gym.”

— Tony Parsons

8. “Learn to trust your instincts. Only something dead goes with the tide. Only something living can go against it.”

— Tony Parsons

9. “I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.”

— Tony Parsons

10. “I have found having my dad as my North Star has worked well for me.”

— Tony Parsons

11. “If someone does something illegal on Twitter – like incite hatred, or make racist remarks, or threaten to rip someone’s intestines out if they insult Justin Bieber – then there has to be some way of censuring them.”

— Tony Parsons

12. “Sometimes we are only aware of how happy we are when the moment has passed. But now and again, if we are very lucky, we are aware of happiness when it is actually happening.”

— Tony Parsons

13. “When he was born, I looked at my little boy and felt an unconditional love I never knew was inside me. As he grew, and I watched him stagger about, squeak his first words, and turn into a beautiful little boy, that feeling did not change.”

— Tony Parsons

14. “The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer’s ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.”

— Tony Parsons

15. “I box for four hours a week and my diet is pretty healthy.”

— Tony Parsons

16. “My parents gave up a lot to bring me up in the little house on the prairie, and I wasn’t prepared to make those sacrifices, nor was the generation before me and the generation after.”

— Tony Parsons

17. “It’s painful and it’s messy. But sometimes you just have to make the break and start again.”

— Tony Parsons

18. “I hate Nassau and the Bahamas. It’s one of those places I’d always wanted to visit since reading Ian Fleming but it was full of casinos with Americans in shorts.”

— Tony Parsons

19. “A tattoo doesn’t make you look like an individual.”

— Tony Parsons

20. “I’ve been visiting Thailand for more than 20 years but didn’t fall in love with it until I visited Phuket Town in Phuket. The northern part of Phuket is one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been, and largely unspoilt and unknown.”

— Tony Parsons

21. “The thing to remember about Phuket is it’s very beach-oriented and relaxed. The trendiest beach is Koh Sirey, which is full of groovy places to have a cocktail and watch the sun go down.”

— Tony Parsons

22. “I can’t think of a bigger waste of police time than chasing somebody who has said something offensive on Twitter.”

— Tony Parsons

23. “When you have a kid, money matters.”

— Tony Parsons

24. “People are always surprised at what a nice guy I am.”

— Tony Parsons

25. “I do tend to look back to my parents generation and think wow! what a great way to be, to live with one person for a lifetime, to bring your kids up in these really solid families.”

— Tony Parsons

26. “I feel like the only person in the world who sees David Beckham modelling his swimming pants on the cover of Elle magazine and thinks – oh, how much better a handsome guy like you would look, David, without all those dumb ink stains stitched into your skin.”

— Tony Parsons

27. “But you have learn to let go, my mother said, ‘That’s part of it, isn’t it?’ ‘Part of what?’ Part of what it means to love someone. To really love someone. If you love someone you just don’t see them as an extension of yourself. You don’t just love them for what’s in it for you.′ ‘Love means knowing when to let go,’ she told me.”

— Tony Parsons

28. “The dream we are living has absolutely no purpose other than our awakening.”

— Tony Parsons

29. “And so we stayed out in the garden of the old house until we couldn’t kick a ball, laughing in the gathering twilight, making the most of the good weather and all the days that were left, our little game watched only by next door’s cat, and every star in the heavens.”

— Tony Parsons

30. “Sometimes the fog in his eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.”

— Tony Parsons

31. “I am a sweet old softy, but it took toughness to get through what I went through.”

— Tony Parsons

32. “And it felt like every time I turned around, somebody was either dying or walking out.”

— Tony Parsons

33. “My teenage years were spent trying to look like Rod Stewart – I ended up looking like Dave Hill from Slade.”

— Tony Parsons

34. “It can’t always be a honeymoon.”

— Tony Parsons

35. “The British – who rarely start a fight, but always know how to finish it – have nothing to be ashamed of.”

— Tony Parsons

36. “There are a handful of barbecue seafood shacks on the beach at Hat Nai Yang, which is a fabulous place to have dinner. It’s very much run for locals and they serve the catch of the day, which might be lobster, white snapper or squid. It’s ridiculously reasonable, too.”

— Tony Parsons

37. “Say what you like about those starry-eyed souls, about the upheaval and destruction they always leave in their wake, but there is one thing about romantics that nobody can deny. They never settle for second best.”

— Tony Parsons

38. “You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them theres a way out.”

— Tony Parsons

39. “Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy.”

— Tony Parsons

40. “The most convincing argument against early parenthood is that you are in a relationship that is likely to fall apart before that child grows up.”

— Tony Parsons

41. “It felt natural. That is what I remember most about becoming a father halfway through my 20s. As if Mother Nature was giving me the big thumbs up.”

— Tony Parsons

42. “I don’t think much of anything I wrote before the age of 30.”

— Tony Parsons

43. “I think that the spirit lives on, I don’t know if it’s in heaven or if it’s somewhere else, some other place that I don’t know anything about. But it doesn’t just die. It lives on. Even if it’s only in the hearts of the people we love.”

— Tony Parsons

44. “The tattooed nation will live to regret this voluntary disfigurement.”

— Tony Parsons

45. “The thing I care about is my weight – I’m as fanatical about it as a member of Girls Aloud. I weigh myself every morning. I know exactly what I want to be – 82kg – and I try to stick to it.”

— Tony Parsons

46. “I think that you can use up your love. I think you can blow it all on one person. You can love so much, so deeply, that there is nothing left for anyone else.”

— Tony Parsons

47. “Don’t you see?” he said. “This could go on for another five years, another ten years, and then where would we be? You want to grow old waiting for something that’s never going to happen? Is that what you want?”

— Tony Parsons