William McIlvanney Quotes

#1. 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

William McIlvanney

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

William McIlvanney

#3. That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided.

William McIlvanney

#4. Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

William McIlvanney

#5. Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

William McIlvanney

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

William McIlvanney

#7. 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.

William McIlvanney

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

William McIlvanney

#9. 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.

William McIlvanney