William McIlvanney Quotes & Sayings

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

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat. — William McIlvanney

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

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity. — William McIlvanney

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice. — William McIlvanney

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

Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable. — William McIlvanney

Coulda made something o' himself. But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man. The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic." The unintentional humour of her remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself. Harkness couldn't stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldn't shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave. — William McIlvanney

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

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

Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings, or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die. — William McIlvanney

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

Son, it's easy tae be guid oan a fu' belly. It's when a man's goat two bites an' wan o' them he'll share, ye ken whit he's made o'. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it's like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a' kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o' who we are, we're deid. We're wan anither. Tae survive, we'll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we'll a' move forward thegither, or nut at all. — William McIlvanney