Alasdair Gray Quotes

17 quotes in 431 categories

• I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough.
• 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…
• Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.
• A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never…
• I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.
• 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…
• Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses.
• 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…
• No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the…
• 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,…
• I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and…
• Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.
• 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…
• ...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…
• Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
• 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…
• She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.

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