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.

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

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.

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

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

...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.

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—

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.