Alasdair Gray Quotes

#1. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#2. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.

Alasdair Gray

#3. 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.

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#7. Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#9. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

#10. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#11. Lanark said irritably, "You seem to understand my questions, but your answers make no sense to me."
"That's typical of life, isn't it?

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#13. Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us.

Alasdair Gray

#14. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#15. People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.

Alasdair Gray

#16. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#17. I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

Alasdair Gray

#18. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#19. Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.

Alasdair Gray

#20. The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied.

Alasdair Gray

#21. 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 -

Alasdair Gray

#22. Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot.

Alasdair Gray

#23. I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough.

Alasdair Gray

#24. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#25. 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.

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#27. People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people

Alasdair Gray

#28. There were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

Alasdair Gray

#29. What satisfaction do you, personally, get from being a writer?" Lanark tried to remember. He said, "It's the only disciplined work I remember trying. I sleep better for it.

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#31. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#32. Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Alasdair Gray

#33. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#34. I'm afraid you'll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can't get along with others and still want to be special.

Alasdair Gray

#35. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#36. 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.

Alasdair Gray

#37. One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

Alasdair Gray

#38. Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police.
A character's response to a discussion about eating from the tree of knowledge.

Alasdair Gray

#39. Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.

Alasdair Gray

#40. But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves.

Alasdair Gray

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

Alasdair Gray

#42. 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.

Alasdair Gray