Quotes from William McIlvanney

They saw five men with travelling bags making more noise than a revolution and being harmless.

He hit McMaster twice, with the left from fear, with the right from courtesy.

Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt.

She was the perfect end to a crappy day, brusque, supercilious and precisely as pleasant as a boil on the sphincter.

The year came and receded like any other leaving its flotsam of the grotesque, the memorable, the trivial.

Aye. He was very nice there. The rest of my life'll be an anti-climax.

The road, it seemed, was a river and he was the only one who knew the stepping-stones.

Laidlaw had seen that quality of arbitrarily shifting perspective before, always in people whose environment was putting them under pressure. It was as if they had been overtaken by the hardness of their experience and mugged by it, so that they lived the rest of their lives concussed.

Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer. The scene was a kind of Method School of Weather—a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another.

The beast he had fought, that ravens upon others, slept underneath my chair.

For them that evening war wasn't politics or geography or the mobilisation of forces. It was, as they entered their houses, a special diffidence in the eyes of some of their women. It was a sharper etching of objects around them, as if a film had been scraped from their eyeballs. It was how the kettle was a comfort, the battered chair luxurious, the collapsing of a coal-husk in the fire inexpressibly elegiac.

They looked as if they were trying to threaten their own destination into appearing.

Laidlaw's mind put on its working clothes.

The place had the gritty untidiness of belonging to no one, a litter bin for wasted time.

She looked like a woman you might jump a few lights to get home to.

Who are the bitterest people in the world? The failed idealists, I would think.

I don't have fights. I have wars.

See, you always buy with notes. Coins are beneath you. You become a whisky-millionaire.

The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale-room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn't a room so much as a suitcase with doors.

They made Lennie feel like an actor who has wandered into the wrong play.

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable.

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.