Alan Sillitoe > Quotes

“I'm me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“All I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life- a little life, I know- but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. I suppose you'll laugh at this, me saying the governor's a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He's stupid, and I'm not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“Don't let the bastards get you down.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up - even if you want to stay where you are - and get you moving again.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“On his first parade the sergeant-major exclaimed that he couldn't make out the shape of Arthur's head because there was so much hair on it, and Arthur jocularly agreed to get it cut, intending to forget about it until the fifteen days was over, which he did. 'You're a soldier now, not a Teddy-boy,' the sergeant-major said, but Arthur knew he was wrong in either case. He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That's what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that's what I am, I'm a dynamite-dealer, Sten-gun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan-lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I'm me and nobody else; and what people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.”
― Allan Sillitoe

“Hope to the very end, he told himself, even when you've slipped into the fires of Hell and the flames are searing your guts.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“It was hard to understand, and all I knew was that you had to run, run, run without knowing why you were running, but on you went through fields you didn't understand and into woods that made you afraid, over hills without knowing you'd been up and down, and shooting across streams that would have cut the heart out of you had you fallen into them. And the winning post was no end to it, even though crowds might be cheering you in, because on you had to go before you got your breath back, and the only time you stopped really was when you tripped over a tree trunk and broke your neck or fell into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“I was neither glad nor unhappy to see her, but maybe that's what shock does, because I was surprised, that I will say.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“...I couldn't see him anymore, and I couldn't see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me”
― Alan Sillitoe

“They sat as if the weight of the world had in this minute been lifted from them both and left them dumb with surprise. But this lasted only for the moment. Arthur held her murderously tight, as if to vanquish her spirit even in the first short contest. But she responded to him, as if she would break him first. It was stalemate, and they sought relief from the great decision they had just brought upon themselves. He spoke to her softly, and she nodded her head to his words without knowing what they meant. Neither did Arthur know what he was saying; both transmission and reception were drowned, and they broke through to the opened furrows of the earth.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The German Numbers Woman

“We know you weren't in the house', he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say 'We', 'We', never 'I' 'I' - as if they feel braver and righter knowing there's a lot of them against only one.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“And when the governor kept saying how 'we' wanted you to do this; and 'we' wanted you to do that, I kept looking round for the other blokes, wondering how many of them there was. Of course, I knew there were thousands of them, but as far as I knew only one was in the room. And there are thousands of them, all over the poxeaten country, in shops, offices, railway stations, cars, houses, pubs—In-law blokes like you and them, all on the watch for Out-law blokes like me and us—and waiting to phone for the coppers as soon as we make a false move. And it'll always be there, I'll tell you that now, because I haven't finished making all my false moves yet, and I dare say I won't until I kick the bucket.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o'clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man in the world, both at once, if you can believe what I'm trying to say.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must have all known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That's how I look at it.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“So as soon as I tell myself I'm the first man ever to be dropped into the world, and as soon as I take that first flying leap into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven't the heart to whistle, I get to thinking, and that's what I like. I go my rounds in a dream, turning at lane or footpath corners without knowing I'm turning, leaping brooks without knowing they're there, and shouting good morning to the early cow-milker without seeing him. It's a treat being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do.”
― Alan Sillitoe

“Защото аз никога не се надбягвам — аз просто тичам и някак си подсъзнателно чувствам, че забравя ли състезанието и побягна равномерно, без да мисля, че тичам, винаги ще печеля.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“I wonder if I'm the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I'm running because I'm too busy thinking.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“He'd never had much to do with the police in the Nottinghamshire village where he lived. They existed at a distance, as it were, and Joshua's life hadn't led him closer than that. By accident his actions had been law-abiding.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Men, Women And Children