You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes o….

I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but ….

I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart..

But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experie….

Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Fr….

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it..

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels..

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The s….

Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a televis….

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa an….

Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, nov….

No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people d….

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get b….

Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having..

I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough..

Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses..

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation..

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it..