Quotes from William McIlvanney

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

I don't like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

Coulda made something o' himself. But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man. The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic." The unintentional humour of her remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself. Harkness couldn't stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldn't shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave.

The law's not about justice. It's a system we've put in place because we can't have justice.

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.

The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic.

The simplicity of this case offends me. It's so neat, it's like a preconception. One thing you can be sure about any preconception. It's wrong. If there's a God and he tried to preconceive the world, he got it wrong.

But there are two basic kinds of professional, Harkness saw in a moment of self-congratulatory illumination. There's the professionalism that does something well enough to earn a living from it. And there's the professionalism that creates a commitment so intense that the earning of a living happens by the way. Its dynamic isn't wages but the determination to do something as well as it can be done.

The old man opened the door with all the ease of the Venus de Milo cracking a safe.

Gin and catatonic?

His face looked like an argument you couldn't win.

urban deprivation, the condition of being so sophisticated that you plumb the nature of most other people's experience out of your life like waste. Your attitudes are so glib and self-assured and automatic, you lose the necessary naivety that is living. That way, you eat everything and taste nothing.

Akitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses.

Laidlaw was reminded that he didn't want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.

This room was the resort of men who hadn't much beyond a sense of themselves and weren't inclined to have that sense diminished. Harkness recognised a feeling he had experienced in other East-End pubs, and understood precisely where the tension came from. It came from the realisation that just by coming in you had shucked the protection of your social status. In this place your only credentials were yourself.

don't have fights. I have wars.' To Harkness

A crime you're trying to solve is a temporary

can protect the relatives of the victim from atavism.

Theatre,' Davy said. 'That's what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They're fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?

the things he hated most was élitism. We share in everyone else or forego ourselves. 'Hullo there, captain.

Macey watched her buttocks move in her fawn cords as if they were chewing a very sweet caramel.

I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed

His face was as welcoming as a turned back.

putting your faith in Milligan is just a fancy term for despair.