Quotes from Alan Sillitoe

He'd never had much to do with the police in the Nottinghamshire village where he lived. They existed at a distance, as it were, and Joshua's life hadn't led him closer than that. By accident his actions had been law-abiding.

Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.

she did everything as if God were watching her: never threw bread on the fire (which was feeding the devil)

As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out. Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck, and then you were hooked up by the arse with a wife.

I'm me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.

All I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda.

Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.

the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life- a little life, I know- but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself

Don't let the bastards get you down.

You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up - even if you want to stay where you are - and get you moving again.

Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.

If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.

Hope to the very end, he told himself, even when you've slipped into the fires of Hell and the flames are searing your guts.

I was neither glad nor unhappy to see her, but maybe that's what shock does, because I was surprised, that I will say.

I couldn't see him anymore, and I couldn't see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me

Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries.

items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.

Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That's how I look at it.

The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must have all known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.

Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o'clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man in the world, both at once, if you can believe what I'm trying to say.

We know you weren't in the house', he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say 'We', 'We', never 'I' 'I' - as if they feel braver and righter knowing there's a lot of them against only one.

I wonder if I'm the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I'm running because I'm too busy thinking.

Michael Cullen talking to his mother) - You told me I never had a father, regretting such a stupid phrase when she replied: 'Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ? I'll get you a cross from Littlewoods if you like, or maybe I'll rent one for three days

All I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda.