A. L. Kennedy Quotes & Sayings

The only contry in the world where there's a majority of women in parliament is Rwanda. Rwanda. That's when women get power, real power - if the men are either dead or in prison. — A. L. Kennedy

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than finding out you were wrong when you thought you were loved. — A. L. Kennedy

The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you'd get when you hugged her, or rolled over onto her pillow when she wasn't there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they'd fit their chin down over the woman's shoulder and there would be this smile, a particular young-seeming grin with closed eyes - always made him think - bliss. — A. L. Kennedy

looked at the better-informed faces passing with that Westminster Expression, the Estate Expression: a certain gravitas, a pinch of visible intelligence, alert attention, and - above all - irritation. Westminster found all that was not Westminster - and much that was - deeply irritating. Here — A. L. Kennedy

Perhaps i am a masochist.
No. Not Possible. If I were basically a masochist then most of my life would have been just nothing but concentrated fun. Every time I woke up, bleeding from my heart and soul, I'd find myself barely able to hide my joy. — A. L. Kennedy

There, there, dear, we're sorry that you'll keep on being you. It's rotten, but what are the choices...? — A. L. Kennedy

If ever the difficulties of your life seem overwhelming, consider the prospect of being eaten alive by savage penguins and rejoice that such horrors are unknown to you. — A. L. Kennedy

Being me is a job - is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn't something people give away and then there's drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That's a full-time occupation: that's like being a miner, or a nurse. — A. L. Kennedy

But the silent majority and I do have one memorial, at least. The Disaster. We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines; the occasional incendiary incident, or a wall of pale faces, crushed against grillwork, one Saturday afternoon in Spring. This is not enough. — A. L. Kennedy

I end up discussing the weather when the weather is all around us and both I and whoever the stranger might be must surely have noticed it. We would be better off asking each other if our faces are still there. — A. L. Kennedy

She wanted to give people something kind and simple. That wasn't available.
The cheap cake was horrible. The expensive cake tasted of greed - of greedy bakers.
She couldn't win.
Who knew cake was such a bastard? — A. L. Kennedy

Toreros must also be accustom themselves to a career which will inevitably involve injury by goring: sometimes serious, if not grotesque, goring. No matter what your personal opinion of the corrida may happen to be, these facts are inescapable: in the corrida, bulls and men meet fear and pain and both may die. — A. L. Kennedy

Do I echo because I am hollow, or because I am a captive animal under stress and reassured by repetitions? — A. L. Kennedy

I can't help it either, the laughing: solemn gatherings, slow
ballads, pompous orations, any person or occasion that assumes I'll
offer my unreserved respect: I tend to find them all hysterical in the
end. Especially if someone similar is there to set me off. They don't
have to do much: I recognize what it looks like when somebody's
composure starts to strip itself away. They'll maybe cross their arms
with that twitchy, shaky, tension, or they'll grab down little wheezes
of embarrassed air, or they'll simply hood their faces under their
palm, trying to hide how fast they're slipping, how fast *we're*
slipping, because I'll be weakening with them by then, I'll be just as
lost, pulled equally tight against the moment when we both stop caring
and let it disgrace us
when we laugh. — A. L. Kennedy

You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone. — A. L. Kennedy

Surgery is just stabbing in a courteous environment — A. L. Kennedy

Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back, — A. L. Kennedy

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. — A. L. Kennedy

Breathing is supposed to keep you calm, but also it keeps you alive and so you are not calm, because you are alive and being alive is never calm. — A. L. Kennedy

Reality - there's nothing but horror in that. — A. L. Kennedy

- you have the Hindenburg burning inside you always - — A. L. Kennedy

Writers' trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven't met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly. — A. L. Kennedy

I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would - but there isn't. So I drink. — A. L. Kennedy

We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin. — A. L. Kennedy

There are times when you've personally known things to misfire
the sentence that fell badly, the dull gift, slapdash comment, hobbled punch line, tight-fisted tip
trying to be too stupid, trying to be too clever, too silly, too carefree, too caring, too free. You can think back to those long and hollow pauses when you realised that you'd misjudged a mood, weren't paying attention, had taken the wrong risk. — A. L. Kennedy

As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free. — A. L. Kennedy

I like cautious people. They are like me. Not that I like me. — A. L. Kennedy

The right wrist, because I'm right-handed - so that must be the one that's done most wrong. Although, now that I think, my sins have mostly been ambidextrous. — A. L. Kennedy

I've always been a man for details, can't get enough of them. Not a spy, not a bit of it, not really. An observer. Product of an unsentimental education. It's the least you can do - watch.
Watch it all tumbling down like the Wall - Berliner Mauer, the Antifacist Protection Rampart. Never a good sign when your wording tries that hard to fight reality, it suggests the beginning of your tumble. Yes, it does. It always does.
But I'd rather watch beauty.
And is that a denial of reality, or an attempt to embrace it? I think I am too tired to know. I hope I am too tired to know. — A. L. Kennedy

He's doing something in Surbiton next. Or Serbia, one or the other. — A. L. Kennedy