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 …

- Alasdair Gray

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

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray

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

- Alasdair Gray

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…

- Alasdair Gray