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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry."
"The rapid dissemination of technology and information offers entirely new ways of production, but it can also bring the spectre of more states developing weapons of mass destruction."
"Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds."
"The great weight of the ship may indeed prevent her from acquiring her greatest velocity; but when she has attained it, she will advance by her own intrinsic motion, without gaining any new degree of velocity, or lessening what she has acquired."
"The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised."
"I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions."
"I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry."
""Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."
"People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share."
"The negative aspects of Scottish Nationalism are a kind of aggressive complacency, that sort of boasting; but that's an expression of insecurity, I think, of a lack of confidence."
"I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window."
"I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me."
"If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law."
"We ought, therefore, to lessen the price of food to our manufacturers, and place them more on a level with the manufacturers who have cheaper food, and also much lighter taxation."
"That's the one for my tombstone... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?"
"The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies."
"It's easier for me to get three times the amount of money I really want."
"To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power."
"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness."
"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
"You had to make an appointment to see her. But it was just a crazy spectacle, people filing past."
"He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier."
"I came to these mediums through having the garden, and of course, people who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration, and never made their own inscriptions."
"The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason."
"I do not care so much for the death of my gunner, as for other passages of my voyage, for I have good friends in England that will bring me off for that."
"Mmm, I love Yoda. I didn't like Jar Jar Binks though, he was all wrong."
"Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men."
"While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another."
"I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?"
"If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper."
"A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind's eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own " a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets."
"The essence of love is kindness."
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