Quotes from Alasdair Gray

I said Burns was a great Scottish poet who loved before Scott, and Shakespeare and Dickens et cetera were all English, but he could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England.

I read an essay by a little girl ... She wrote,' I am nothing and nobody. My cat was stuck to the wall. I tried to pull her off but they threw my cat away.

I was reading Punch or The London Charivari, an English magazine of art and comedy. The pictures showed many kinds of people. The ugliest and most comical ae Scots, Irish, foreign, poor, servants, rich folk who have been poor until very recently, small men, old unmarried women and Socialists. The Socialists are the ugliest, very dirty and hairy with weak chins, and seem to spend their time grumbling to other people at street corners.

Are there no British natives? In Wales, Ireland and Scotland perhaps. In England we still have a class of farmers, farm servants, estate workers et cetera, but the landowners and city dwellers regard them as useful animals, like horses and dogs.

Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distate for human problems?

The other world improvers point out that parliament is an alliance of monarchs, lords, bishops, lawyers, merchants, bankers, brokers, industrialists, military men, landlords and civil servants who run it to protect their wealth AND FOR NO OTHER REASON.

She said she wanted to help little girls, mothers, prostitutes. he said this was a good idea because at present almost all who worked with these people had different sexual organs from their patients.

Our boys were all preparing to be peaceful professional Scottish public servants, using the most humane modern ideas to tacle what we knew to be the great task of the twentieth century - to make a Britain where everyone has a good clean home and is well paid for useful work.

I used to think Denny was foolish because she had no definite ideas about the world. I had very definite ideas: the world was a mess, but its problems could be solved by modern technology, and when Alan and I left college we would begin to improve things. I was an ignorant git. If intelligence asks searching questions and does not relax on a pile of glib answers Denny was the intelligent half of us.

Si un travail prenant et rémunérateur, une amitié intéressante et peu exigeante, et une demeure confortable sont les meilleures bases du bonheur, alors les mois suivants furent sans doute les plus agréables que j'eusse connus.

Our system of class prejudice is the cleverest piece of self-frustrating daftness since the Tower of Babel, it benefits nobody but a few at the top. We fool ourselves into fooling others into fooling ourselves even more.

Poor Dad. I suspect he was a lonely man. He did not mean to crush my delight in my little book of magic windows and he certainly prepared me for LIFE – which is a spark of delight buried under routines disciplines possessions plans and compromises which are meant to protect it, help it grow, make it useful to other people, and which eventually smother and kill it.

It is, but we can only help people by giving less than we take away from them. We enlarge the oasis by increasing the desert. That is the science of time and housekeeping. Some call it economics.

You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.

I STARTED MAKING MAPS WHEN I WAS SMALL SHOWING PLACE, RESOURCES, WHERE THE ENEMY AND WHERE LOVE LAY. I DID NOT KNOW TIME ADDS TO LAND. EVENTS DRIFT CONTINUALLY DOWN, EFFACING LANDMARKS, RAISING THE LEVEL, LIKE SNOW.

Memoria este un proces de editare care exagereaz? inevitabil unele episoade, le reprim? pe altele È™i aranjeaz? evenimentele într-o ordine mai clar?, dar nimeni nu recunoaÈ™te asta despre propria memorie.

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

I am the instrument of a firm which installs instruments to protect the instruments of firms which produce meat cloth machines and whisky, instruments to feed, dress, move and stupefy us.

Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others.

He contained two equal sorts of knowledge: the warm lazy knowledge that above on the mountain a blond girl in a white dress waited for him, shy and eager; and the cooler knowledge that this was unlikely and the good of climbing was the exercise and view from the top. There was no conflict between these knowledges, his mind passed easily from one to the other, but when he stood up to begin the last of the climb the thought of the girl was stronger.

In m second year I attended a public debate on a theme that interested me, though not by its novelty: does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones? In those days that theme was supposed to be religious as well as scientific, so the principle speakers swerved from fanatical solemnity to facetious jocularity, and changed the ground of their argument whenever it gave them the slightest advantage over their opponents.

Truth and goodness do not depend on me, Bell. I am too weak. I am as poor a thing as General Blessington. Prepare to despise both of us.

But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent—

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.