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, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

Categorized in : Book New York Artist

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

Alasdair Gray

nations ifs

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 of changes.

Alasdair Gray

leader talking thinking

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

Alasdair Gray

should fun thinking

...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 back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

Alasdair Gray

want writing world

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 after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man?

Alasdair Gray

good-life fighting mean

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 do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.

Alasdair Gray

pie men war

Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us.

Alasdair Gray

bridges home people

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 seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

Alasdair Gray

immature ordinary numbers

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

Alasdair Gray

freedom-to-choose

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 experiences of the things they represent—

Alasdair Gray

daylight dawn rivers

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

Alasdair Gray

lasts church half

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.

Alasdair Gray

plants-growing eggs dog

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 Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot.

Alasdair Gray

friday dresses thinking

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

Alasdair Gray

had-enough ought love-is

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

Alasdair Gray

wicked said people

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

Alasdair Gray

glasgow novel song

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

Alasdair Gray

speech heart lying