Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Scottish Authors - Page 2

It's easy to laugh at etiquette, but in a hundred years, our children's grandchildren will almost certainly be laughing at us.

So long as you've got your friends about you, and a good positive attitude, you don't really have to care what everyone else thinks.

When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.

Most of my memories are the sound of rain on caravan roofs.

I want to make music that will make the blood surge in your veins, music that will get people up and dance.

At the end of the day, you want a straightforward, simple system which everyone understands. If you can get clarity and simplicity in any process, it's better for everybody.

If anyone said to me 'invent a new monster so we can sell more toys', I'd kick them out of my office.

I'm handsome, no ands, buts or ifs.

If you're going to be wrong, be dramatically wrong.

I definitely have no stability in my world; I feel the need to be up and merry all the time.

Some of the best jokes are about funerals or people dying or whatever. Laughter and tears are two sides of the same coin.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

See, what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren't you? Well, I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

I think we go to our graves being a bit weird.

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

I am the despair of my accountant; I am the plastic bags of receipts.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

I rely on the promise, 'God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.'

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

The success of the film is down to the crew.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

We are supposed to enjoy the good stuff now, while we can, with the people we love. Life has a funny way of teaching us that lesson over and over again.

It's an important point to make that people can't just be invalidated, eradicated, because they don't fit tidily into a box. And more and more, the modern world is all about conformity.

Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there's always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.

I love spring flowers: daffodils and hyacinths are the ultimate flower for me. They are the essence of spring.

The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.

I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.

Acting is all about finding the truth within whatever world you're in.

In 'Notting Hill,' I was part of a whole plot line over six scenes that was completely taken out. That was rather depressing.

Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.

I've never played for a draw in my life.

You have to make decisions that you think are right for the club. I also think that, in the dressing room, there should only ever be one voice and it's got to be the manager's.

We can all fight against loneliness by engaging in random acts of kindness.

Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!

May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.

Jealousy... is a mental cancer.

Life is settled and I'm enjoying it.

Sometimes, it's better to stop thinking and trust your instincts. That's what I used to do when I first started making music, but as time goes on, you can sometimes over-intellectualise things.

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

I really admire medical people. They have a great sense of humour, and they just have to get on with it.

'Doctor Who' is not as literary as 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' is - books have come out, but they are from the television episodes. So there is that difference... it's more scholastic.

Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me.

I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.

If there was a wrong note, it didn't matter as long as it was rocking.

I've got more important things to think about. I've got a yogurt to finish by today, the expiry date is today.

Fulfill - you can far more than fulfill - the brightest anticipations of those who, in the name of human freedom, and in the face of threats that have ripened into terrible realities since, fought that battle which placed you where you now stand.

For someone who doesn't live there, when I go back to Scotland it's very weird for me.

I was a bit of a late developer, and everyone was saying, 'Whatever you do, don't shave,' and I hadn't really started shaving. I remember rubbing the soot from a kettle on to my bumfluff to make it look more like I had a beard.

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

And now, this is the sweetest and most glorious day that ever my eyes did see.

No doubt these rocky islands have suggested the idea worked out in gardens, and they have been well imitated.

I went to school at Juilliard, and most of our training there is the classics, and as much as I thrive in contemporary, weird, experimental work, I really am excited about finding a pioneer woman or something from a different era that I could really sink my teeth into.

My first ever job of doing additional writing for Hans was 'Batman Begins', so that's going back I don't know, are we at 13 years now? I was his assistant for maybe ten years, a long journey.

I had always thought of myself as a sanguine person, quite light and airy. But for a long while, no one could have possibly made me laugh or smile. It was awful.

I'm thinking to myself, I just love doing the art, it takes me a morning to do.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.