Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture.

I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead.

Somebody will be exhibiting a bunch of bananas in a gallery, and they'll get me on to talk dirty about it.

Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

I wasn’t dying alone. My beloved was dying with me.

Nothing's ever entirely new. It's more a matter of what gets picked up from the past at each time.

[Fireheart]mewed,"It's not my place to judge you." Greystripe looked up as Fireheart went on." Greystripe, whatever you decide to do, I will always be your friend.

... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land

People think they know me from somewhere, and then I open my mouth and they realise it's me from Birds Of A Feather.

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.

The world is grown so bad, That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.