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 ….

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….

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….

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

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….

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….

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

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

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

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

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

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….

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….

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….

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

...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….

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….

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