Quotes from Alasdair Gray

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.

You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.

I intend to dance once with everybody - except the other Joy. I'm going to dance twice with the other Joy. Why? Because being unusually kind to someone will give me a feeling of power.

Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses.

Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be found here in concentrated form.

The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I'm never sure what square to go to. Yet it can't be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.

She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel.

What would happen if most people tried to act intelligently on their own behalf? Anarchy. (....) So what can we do with this intelligence we don't need and can't use? Stupefy it. Valium for housewives, glue-sniffing for schoolkids, hash for adolescents, rotgut South African wine for the unemployed, beer for the workers, spirits for me and the crowd I left downstairs fifteen minutes ago.

When a thing is perfect it is eternal. It can be destroyed afterward, or slowly decay, but its perfection is safe in the past, which is the only inevitable part of the universe.

He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart.

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.

I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man?

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.

I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in.

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her. Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.

I wish I could make you like death a little more. It's a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into face, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life.

Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.

You pessimists always fall into the disillusion trap," said the cheerful man cheerfully. "From one distance a thing looks bright. From another it looks dark. You think you've found the truth when you've replaced the cheerful view by the opposite, but true profundity blends all possible views, bright as well as dark.

He may gain consciousness and feel like talking. I could leave a nurse here but their damned professional cheeriness depresses introspective men. Talk to him if he feels like it, and if he wants a doctor call me on this.

The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.

That is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second.

I know now that what was wrong with her was too much energy and intelligence. Cleaning a room and kitchen, serving a husband and son, entertaining the neighbours did not use her up.