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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out."
"Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue i.e. it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly we will always be inclined to bank on God's miracles and refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job and it will never be done unless we do it."
"Wisdom, prudence, forethought, these are essential. But not second to these that noble courage which adventures the right, and leaves the consequences to God."
"In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work."
"And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also."
"We met in Cracker. I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me."
"Ask yourself the three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything. 1) Does this need to be said 2) 'Does this need to be said by me? 3) Does this need to be said by me now?"
"When I stopped drinking, it was only because I thought if I don't stop, I'm going to die."
"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education."
"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing."
"Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness."
"Unless a man undertakes more than he possibly can do, he will never do all he can do."
"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."
"I was putting myself under enormous pressure to be successful."
"Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone but moral doubt."
"It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics."
"So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend."
"Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest continue always the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful."
"Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius."
"At the moment, my mother is the only one left in Glasgow, although it's certainly my home."
"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."
"It is one thing to follow God's way of service if you are regarded as a hero, but quite another thing if the road marked out for you by God requires becoming a 'doormat' under other people's feet."
"I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary."
"Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good."
"On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love never faileth and life never faileth so long as there is love."
"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."
"There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones."
"Wake the power within thee slumbering, trim the plot that's in thy keeping, thou wilt bless the task when reaping sweet labour's prize."
"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
"It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have."
"The wedding took place in Vermont, where they have legalized gay civil unions, and I married a woman."
"Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating."
"Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting."
"Fame is being asked to sign your autograph on the back of a cigarette packet."
"I used to be pretty reckless. When I was a runner for a production company, I drove a massive 16 seater van. I was only 18. I mean I look young now, but then I looked about 12."
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