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

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

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.

...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.

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

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

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

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

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—

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

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

I felt like Dirty Harry, only, my weapon wasn’t as big as his! I don’t know what it is with guns, but once you’ve got your hand on one, you think you’re one of the untouchables.

Your lifestyle should contrast your obedience

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.

To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.

The marriage-equality issue should be recognized for what it truly is - a civil rights issue that must be approved to assure that every citizen is treated equally under the law.

When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.

Meet them once and you're innocent; meet them twice and you're not. So if you see me having drinks again with Harvey Weinstein then, okay, you've got me.

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions.