Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Scottish Authors - Page 20

People go to see a film because it's a great story and it's visually exciting to watch.

When things begin to go bad, the perception of people makes it worse.

I'm not a fan of second-hand or vintage clothes.

When I had other things to deal with in my personal life, people were telling me to come and play for Scotland. So I'd come but then not play. I'd prefer people just to be honest with me and say whether they really want me there or just as a back-up.

It's a very dull thing to watch, a writer at work. So dull that whole casts of characters show up just to watch the boring writer writing.

Life in LA is not lying in the sun for months. It is having a 4pm meeting and leaving at noon to sit in traffic for four hours. It's not glam.

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

There is a lot of things to weigh up when a transfer happens, and money is a big factor.

I've always bought CDs and even when I was young and at primary school I had a massive collection of CDs. I just like the excitement of opening it, reading the book, learning all the words and things like that. Hopefully I'll always be like that.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

I'm afraid of happy people. They're chemically unbalanced.

I wear SoulCycle stuff every single day of my life.

Certainly in the case of 'Kill Your Friends,' a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.

I don't get emotional.

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

The regular hours necessary to be observed by those who follow country business, are perhaps of more consequence than any of the other articles, however important those may be.

Even in the early stages, you can tell who thinks you're an idiot singing songs someone else has written for you. We never wanted to be two producers and a girl who wears some shoes.

They all in general had putrid gums, the spots and lassitude, with weakness of their knees.

I am at my best when I am scoring.

It is much to be wished that one had a post that knew what it was doing again; and lawmakers that knew what they were doing. If I were the Government, I should feel rather ashamed of making regulations one month and unmaking them the next.

My adolescence was a kind of motorway pile-up. I wish I had known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth.

I do tend to overdo everything.

When my divorce came through, it was like being let out of a cage because I hadn't been true to myself before; I was being something that was expected of me.

I played against the Brazilians in '82, who were definitely the best team never to have won the World Cup.

Well, it seems all the fish in the rivers are dying. Could this be an act of cod?

In Britain, politicians who openly discuss their spirituality are about as welcome as Jehovah' s Witnesses on the doorstep, and the British associate the mixture of politics and religion as a heady cocktail best reserved for the mass irrationality of Northern Ireland, Iran, Kashmir, and the Middle East.

I'm doing a Dylan Thomas film, Map of Love, with Mick Jagger producing again. It's a wonderful script.

I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: 'Wait a minute - if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?' And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.

Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.

You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.

I entertain people. I think that's pretty good. That's what I contribute to society. I'm proud of what I do.

I think your life is governed not by the bricks or mortar around you, it's governed by who holds your hand and who spits in your eye.

I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of this fragrant leaf than did Johnson.

If it doesn't come through the Internet, it's not really compelling to me.

I had a lot of alone time with no brothers or sisters running around, or anything. I would just sit and imagine things, all the time.

Normally I will have five or six cups of tea a day, and if I can have them poured from a teapot, then all the better. I think tea tastes so much nicer from a pot.

I think, in effect, in most of the European countries, the total marginal tax rate is over 50 percent; that's to say, add on other taxes like VAT to the income tax.

He who has faith has... an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well - even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.

My goal was to play 350-capacity rooms in the U.K. and, if I was lucky, 100-capacity rooms in Europe. I just wanted to play music and make money off it.

At the present moment the people of England are only three-quarters fed, and the result of this improvement in the export of our manufactures would be, that they would be entirely fed.

When I'm making records, I like it to be quite fast. Don't let the band learn it too well.

For the standard of Christian life was to be strained to a higher pitch; more fasting was required, and more careful separation from the manners and enjoyments of the world; celibacy and martyrdom had great value set upon them, and second marriages were prohibited.

I do a good cold, hard stare.

One of the reasons Old Firm supporters could relate to me was I was one of them, playing for the team I wanted to play for. If we scored at Celtic Park, the only people I wanted to celebrate in front of was Rangers supporters.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

My hearing is out of the ordinary as others might see it, but not for me. I'm used to my hearing in the same way that I'm used to the size of my hands.

I'm not a career filmmaker. I just like to do things that I still kind of believe in and because of that you just never know what's going to happen next. It doesn't matter if it's been a good year or a bad year: next year, there's no telling what it will be like.

An actor has power, and their power is very simple: it's the power to say no.

I've never had a highly developed sense of being female. The sexuality has either been stopped, or else it's been an exaggerated P J Harvey kind of sexuality.

I sat in on some songwriting classes, and it was really bloody hard, a lot of music theory. I'd be sitting there, and they'd be talking all this music theory, and the teacher would say, 'Let's ask our guest Jimmy what he thinks,' and I'd be sitting there thinking, 'Please don't ask me, please don't ask me.'

Periodically, my mind is blown and I'm swamped in feelings I can't deny.

A lot of nasty and untrue things have been said about me.

And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.

No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

I've been listening to a new band called Wolf Alice, courtesy of my son. The vocalist, Ellie Rowsell, has a gorgeous voice.

It is near thirty years since He made it sure; and since that time, though there has fallen out much sin, yet I was never out of an assurance of mine interest, nor long out of sight of His presence.

I only seek in my old age to perfect that which I had not before thoroughly learned in my youth, because my sins were a hindrance to me.