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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"I have been made redundant before and it is a terrible blow; redundant is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless."
"When you want something badly enough it's amazing what you'll ignore."
"It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom."
"One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul but prayer puts my soul in command of my body."
"To God be humble, to thy friend be kind, and with thy neighbors gladly lend and borrow; His chance tonight, it maybe thine tomorrow."
"Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different."
"If you open your mouth in the dark, you will speak while in the wrong mood--darkness is the time to listen."
"I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?"
"It's definitely an intrinsic part of my makeup that makes me want to see black when everyone else is seeing white."
"The people who influenced me most were the people who said I would never make it. They gave me a thirst for revenge."
"In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods."
"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come."
"It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are."
"There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society."
"But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!"
"I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction."
"My parents used to take me to the pet department and tell me it was a zoo."
"I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme."
"I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same."
"Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought."
"There are so many things I'd like to change in the industry. Everything from the reliance of style over substance to their reluctance to hire me for big budget blockbusters, but the thing I would love most would be if they understood people don't have to be Hollywood beautiful to be sexy or interesting."
"Having said that, I enjoyed every minute of my time and I got a degree of job satisfaction which I am sure was far greater than the majority of my colleagues."
"The hardest thing in life to learn is which bridge to cross and which to burn."
"I like black and white films. I don't exactly know why - probably because there is a stylization which is removed from actual life, unlike a color film."
"And also, it's sort of my job to make you believe things about him that aren't true about me."
"'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come."
"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."
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