James Kelman Quotes

“ I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape.
(James Meek in interview with TMO)”
― James Meek

“And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye.”
― James Kelman

“When [James] Kelman talks of 'the narrative belonging to them and them alone', he echoes Frantz Fanon (1921-61) and Edward Said (1935-2003)'s accounts of how imperial power expropriates not only the material life of the colonised, but their mental life as well, causing them to think of their own identities within categories fashioned by their oppressors. The Scots areperhaps particularly schizophrenic in this respect. At a material level, they are a First World people, the beneficiaries of being what Tom Nairn (1932-2023) has described as the junior partners in a highly profitable imperial enterprise. Inside their heads, however, they are a Third World people, their identities shaped by images and discourses (English literature, Holywood movies) articulated elsewhere but lived within by the Scots themselves. It has been the profound political as well as artistic achievement of novelists such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, and poets such as Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), Tom Leonard (1944-2018) and Liz Lochhead to have fashioned a distinctively Scottish voice, one homologous with Scots' interior life and experience of the world.”
― Colin McArthur, Dissident Voices: The Politics of Television and Cultural Change