Alasdair Gray Quotes & Sayings

The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. — Alasdair Gray

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid 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 television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us. — Alasdair Gray

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. — Alasdair Gray

Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses. — 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

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do. — Alasdair Gray

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 fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man? — Alasdair Gray

He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart. — Alasdair Gray

Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be found here in concentrated form. — Alasdair Gray

Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distate for human problems? — Alasdair Gray

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.
Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it. — Alasdair Gray

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. — Alasdair Gray

It is, but we can only help people by giving less than we take away from them. We enlarge the oasis by increasing the desert. That is the science of time and housekeeping. Some call it economics. — Alasdair Gray

I intend to dance once with everybody - except the other Joy. I'm going to dance twice with the other Joy."
"Why?"
"Because being unusually kind to someone will give me a feeling of power. — Alasdair Gray

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it. — Alasdair Gray

I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough. — 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, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. — Alasdair Gray

Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly. — Alasdair Gray

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 get back to the hellish one I'm imagining. — 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 quietly in groups. Coulter at a desk in front of Thaw turned round and said, "What are ye reading?"
Thaw showed a book of critical essays on art and literature.
Coulter said accusingly, "You don't read that for fun."
"Yes, I read it for fun."
"People our age don't read that sort of book for fun. They read it to show they're superior."
"But I read this sort of book even when there's nobody around to see me."
"That shows you arenae trying to make us think you're superior, you're trying to make yourself think you're superior. — 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 and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them. — Alasdair Gray

But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves. — 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 than our experiences of the things they represent - — 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 tree of knowledge. — Alasdair Gray

What would happen if most people tried to act intelligently on their own behalf? Anarchy. ( ... ) So what can we do with this intelligence we don't need and can't use? Stupefy it. Valium for housewives, glue-sniffing for schoolkids, hash for adolescents, rotgut South African wine for the unemployed, beer for the workers, spirits for me and the crowd I left downstairs fifteen minutes ago. — 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 and then abduction, rape, slavery. That book, at least, is true."
"It is not true. It is a male sex fantasy."
"And life for most women is just that, a performance in a male sex fantasy. The stupid ones don't notice, they've been trained for it since they were babies, so they're happy. And of course the writer of that book made things obvious by speeding them up. What happens to the Blandish girl in a few weeks takes a lifetime for the rest of us. — Alasdair Gray

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. — 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 never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses. — Alasdair Gray

The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content. — Alasdair Gray

War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation. — Alasdair Gray

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it. — Alasdair Gray

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 on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot. — Alasdair Gray

People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people — Alasdair Gray

People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon. — Alasdair Gray

She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel. — Alasdair Gray

I'm afraid you'll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can't get along with others and still want to be special. — Alasdair Gray

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 the causes of changes. — Alasdair Gray

I wish I could make you like death a little more. It's a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into face, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life. — Alasdair Gray

What satisfaction do you, personally, get from being a writer?" Lanark tried to remember. He said, "It's the only disciplined work I remember trying. I sleep better for it. — Alasdair Gray

He may gain consciousness and feel like talking. I could leave a nurse here but their damned professional cheeriness depresses introspective men. Talk to him if he feels like it, and if he wants a doctor call me on this. — Alasdair Gray

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away. — Alasdair Gray

I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would he quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love. — Alasdair Gray

I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in. — Alasdair Gray

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

Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others. — 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 difficult game, most folk play it instinctively. — Alasdair Gray

Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. — Alasdair Gray

Who did the council fight?"
"It split in two and fought itself."
"That's suicide!"
"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 people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."
"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."
"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"
"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.
"You have a son?"
"Not yet. — Alasdair Gray