Joy Quote by Alasdair Gray

“At last she interrupted with a harsh rattle of laughter. "Oh, yes, I like this book! Crazy hopes of a glamorous, rich, colorful life…

— Alasdair Gray

“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…

— Alasdair Gray

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…

— Alasdair Gray

“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

Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a…

— Alasdair Gray

“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…

— Alasdair Gray

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has…

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

“One day after the exams, the teachers sat at their desks correcting papers while the pupils read comics, played chess or cards or talked…

— Alasdair Gray

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,…

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa…

— Alasdair Gray