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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God."
"It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor."
"When George asked me to be the prequels, it was the same kind of meeting - it was very short and to the point. It was nice to see him after a long time, and we met in a hotel room."
"But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality - a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature."
"Unless it's done superbly, as in the Japanese film Gate of Hell, color can be a very distracting element."
"Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us."
"Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create."
"The animated books pay the lowest rates at the Big Two and you can forget about royalties."
"I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin."
"The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular."
"There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine."
"I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling."
"There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books."
"When I am in the Scottish Parliament chamber, I often feel the need to sit for the entire debate. It's only courteous to listen to what everyone has to say, although I often find myself desperate to say something but too scared to stand up in case I regret it."
"The first job of a writer is to be honest."
"There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won t."
"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."
"When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over."
"I think people are as individual as snowflakes, they kinda look alike but no two are the exactly the same, and all classification is the root of prejudice."
"It is long since I could have adventured on eternity, through God's mercy and Christ's merits; but death remained somewhat terrible, and that now is taken away; and now death is no more to me, but to cast myself into my husband's arms, and to lie down with Him."
"If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race."
"The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own. Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children."
"The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom."
"People go to see a film because it's a great story and it's visually exciting to watch."
"But I never just quite liked that ryhme.''Why not, child?''Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight."
"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."
"O, lack and doubt and fear can only comeBecause of plenty, confidence, and love!They are the shadow-forms about their feet,Because they are not perfect crystal-clearTo the all-searching sun in which they live.Dread of its loss is Beauty's certain seal!"
"The scraps of information she'd gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time " the unsaid."
"Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us."
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