James Kelman Quotes

#1. Funny how ye tell people a story to make a point and ye fail, ye fail, a total disaster. Not only do ye no make yer point it winds up the exact fucking opposite man, the exact fucking opposite. That isnay a misunderstanding it's a total
whatever.

James Kelman

#2. Creativity is not passive, I don't see the creation of art as passive.

James Kelman

#3. My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.

James Kelman

#4. Waiting rooms. Ye go into this room where ye wait. Hoping's the same. One of these days the cunts'll build entire fucking buildings just for that. Official hoping rooms, where ye just go in and hope for whatever the fuck ye feel like hoping for.

James Kelman

#5. Theoretical webs, dirty webs, fusty webs, old and shrivelling away into nothingness, a fine dust.Who needs that kind of stuff. Far far better getting out into the open air and doing it, actually doing it, something solid and concrete and unconceptualisable.

James Kelman

#6. And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye.

James Kelman

#7. Folk take a battering but, they do; they get born and they get brought up and they get fuckt. That's the story; the cot to the fucking funeral pyre.

James Kelman

#8. I used to think there was something up with any female that liked me, I mean, if she didni get bored with my company, there had to be something up with her. Otherwise how come she wasni with somebody else? If she was normal she would be. Ergo she had to have a personality problem.

James Kelman

#9. In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

James Kelman

#10. The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.

James Kelman