Alasdair Gray > Quotes

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

“She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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, Lanark

“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“...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

“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, Poor Things

“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, Every Short Story, 1951-2012

“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, Poor Things

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here…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, Lanark

“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, Poor Things

“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, Lanark

“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, Lanark

“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, Lanark

“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

“I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough.”
― Alasdair Gray, Lanark

“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, Poor Things

“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, Lanark

“Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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, Poor Things

“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, Poor Things

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

“Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead. They treat patients' bodies as if the minds, the lives, were of no account. The smooth bedside manner we cultivate is seldom more than a cheap anaesthetic to make our patients as passive as the corpses we train upon. But a portrait painter does not learn his art by scraping layers of varnish from a Rembrandt, then slicing off the impasto, dissolving the ground and finally separating the fibres of the canvas.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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, Lanark

“does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones?”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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, Lanark

“If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading, but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you
read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated,
depressed, bored) and so on – all these factors, and others, make the simple experience of reading a
book a far more complex and multi-layered affair than might be thought.”
― Alasdair Gray , Lanark

“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“That is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things