Top 35 Alasdair Gray Quotes (2026 Update)

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

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

4. “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

5. “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

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

— Alasdair Gray

7. “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

8. “I don’t think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won’t learn anything unless you enjoy it.”

— Alasdair Gray

9. “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

10. “Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.”

— Alasdair Gray

11. “The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied.”

— Alasdair Gray

12. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can’t get along with others and still want to be special.”

— Alasdair Gray

13. “When a thing is perfect it is eternal. It can be destroyed afterward, or slowly decay, but its perfection is safe in the past, which is the only inevitable part of the universe.”

— Alasdair Gray

14. “I ought to have more love before I die. I’ve not had enough.”

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

16. “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

17. “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

18. “But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves.”

— Alasdair Gray

19. “He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart.”

— Alasdair Gray

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

— Alasdair Gray

21. “Truth and goodness do not depend on me, Bell. I am too weak. I am as poor a thing as General Blessington. Prepare to despise both of us.”

— Alasdair Gray

22. “Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”

— Alasdair Gray

23. “Unselfish and hard-working are useless virtues when separated from courage and intelligence.”

— Alasdair Gray

24. “That is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second.”

— Alasdair Gray

25. “The loving kindness of people is what creates and supports us, keeps our society running and lets us move freely in it.”

— Alasdair Gray

26. “She said she wanted to help little girls, mothers, prostitutes. he said this was a good idea because at present almost all who worked with these people had different sexual organs from their patients.”

— Alasdair Gray

27. “To improve the world, Bella, you need only build a high mountain between every town and its nearest neighbour, or chop the continents into many islands of equal size.”

— Alasdair Gray

28. “You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.”

— Alasdair Gray

29. “You were too sane to teach a child about craziness and cruelty. I had to learn about those from people who were crazy and cruel themselves.”

— Alasdair Gray

30. “If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them.”

— Alasdair Gray

31. “You pessimists always fall into the disillusion trap,” said the cheerful man cheerfully. “From one distance a thing looks bright. From another it looks dark. You think you’ve found the truth when you’ve replaced the cheerful view by the opposite, but true profundity blends all possible views, bright as well as dark.”

— Alasdair Gray

32. “I did not dream of her because I never dream at all, but when we next met I believed for almost a minute that I was in bed dreaming although I was wide awake in a public park.”

— Alasdair Gray

33. “Everyone should have a cosy shell around them, a good coat with money in the pockets. I must be a Socialist.”

— Alasdair Gray

34. “The public hospitals are places where doctors learn how to get money off the rich by practising on the poor. That is why poor people dread and hate them, and why those with a good income are operated upon privately, or in their own homes.”

— Alasdair Gray

35. “Truth and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air, and bread.”

— Alasdair Gray