William Mcilvanney Quotes

#1. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

Ian Rankin

#2. I think sometimes it's too hard to believe in yourself. You just do the things you're not sure you can do. You just act, in spite of not being certain. I don't believe I can change the world - it sounds stupid to even talk about it - but I'm going to try.

Cassandra Clare

#3. It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship.

Barry Hughart

#4. Field is the palace of the peasant!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#5. 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

#6. He was happily married - but his wife wasn't.

Victor Borge

#7. The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.

Julian Jaynes

#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. 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

#10. You can do everything right and still feel out of place.

Joyce Rachelle

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

William McIlvanney

#12. 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

#13. Anger will always stand in the way of your dreams. Don't let anyone take your dreams.

Sue Fitzmaurice

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

William McIlvanney

#15. 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

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

William McIlvanney

#17. I am not sad because I do not have you, I am sad because I don't have love.

Pushpa Rana

#18. For two days I went about my business. I travelled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.

Markus Zusak

#19. You always have a choice, Gaia. You can always say no." His voice was strangely hollow. "They might kill you for it, but you can always say no.

Caragh M. O'Brien

#20. 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