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Alasdair Gray Quotes

Alasdair Gray is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel, Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years. It is now regarded as a classic, and was described by The Guardian as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction." His novel Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He describes himself as a civic nationalist and a republican.

Gray's works combine elements of realism, fantasy, and science fiction, plus clever use of typography and his own illustrations. He has also written on politics, in support of socialism and Scottish independence, and on the history of English literature. He has been described by author Will Self as "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision", and as "a great writer, perhaps the greatest living in this archipelago today" and by himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian". His artwork is held by museums including Kelvingrove & The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History

✵ 28. December 1934 – 29. December 2019   •   Other names אלאסדייר גריי
Alasdair Gray photo

Works

Poor Things
Poor Things
Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray: 8   quotes 0   likes

Famous Alasdair Gray Quotes

“The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart.”

Alasdair Gray

Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
Context: I asked the headmaster of literature, "Why are there so many headmasters and so few poets? Is it easier for you to train your own kind than ours?" He said, "No. The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart."

"Five Letters from an Eastern Empire", p. 88.

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

Alasdair Gray

Frontispiece Variants on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/holyrood/faq/answers/art006.htm They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies": And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization. http://election.theherald.co.uk/homepage/electionnews/display.var.1370748.0.canadians_should_look_out_for_scottish_election.php Gray later devised a more distinct variant of this, because he believed the "nation" version should be credited to Lee: Work as if you live in the early days of a better world. As quoted in "Early Days of a Better Nation" by Harry Mcgrath, in Scottish Review of Books (28 March 2013) https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

“… 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

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

Alasdair Gray book Poor Things

Source: Poor Things

“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 book Lanark: A Life in Four Books

Source: Lanark

“This slip has been inserted by mistake.”

Alasdair Gray

An erratum slip in the first edition.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

“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 seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but or if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb.”

Alasdair Gray

"Prometheus", pp. 208-9.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

“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 seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but or if.”

Alasdair Gray

Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb.
"Prometheus", pp. 208-9.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

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