Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 18

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.
Sara Sheridan
Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.
Sara Sheridan
I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.
Sara Sheridan
Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.
Sara Sheridan
I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.
Sara Sheridan
Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.
Sara Sheridan
Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.
Sara Sheridan
In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.
Sara Sheridan
For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.
Sara Sheridan
I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
Sara Sheridan
It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.
Sara Sheridan
I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.
Sara Sheridan
At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other.
Sara Sheridan
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.
George MacDonald
... I deny your right to put words into my mouth.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be unable to bear disapproval was an unworthy weakness. But in her case it came nowise of the pride which blame stirs to resentment, but altogether of the self-depreciation which disapproval rouses to yet greater dispiriting. Praise was to her a precious thing, in part because it made her feel as if she could go on; blame, a misery, in part because it made her feel as if all was of no use, she never could do anything right. She had not yet learned that the right is the right, come of praise or blame what may. The right will produce more right and be its own reward--in the end a reward altogether infinite, for God will meet it with what is deeper than all right, namely, perfect love.
George MacDonald
He had the fault of thinking too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected, self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result. … His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained exterior.
George MacDonald
The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for it
George MacDonald
No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand.
George MacDonald
Any pride or haughtiness, is displeasing to us, merely because it shocks our own pride, and leads us by sympathy into comparison, which causes the disagreeable passion of humility.
David Hume
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.
Sara Sheridan
Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.
Sara Sheridan
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.
Iain M. Banks
A vision is best presented as a story that people can relate to.
Jim Kerr
And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.
Fish
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
Iain Banks
Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel.
George MacDonald
Nothing was being done to help the non-dopers, to encourage or support them. Even the clean riders like myself and Moncout knew how easy it was to cheat the tests.
David Millar
If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
George MacDonald
I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.
Sara Sheridan
I'm very aware we are the first generation ever to have such incredible opportunities to express ourselves publicly to a worldwide audience.
Sara Sheridan
I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do.
Sara Sheridan
Everybody seemed to like Skype except him, Tony thought, closing his office door then settling in front of his screen. His dislike was both personal and professional. Everybody looked weird on Skype. Everyone, frankly, looked like a potential patient. There was something very unsettling about that fish-eyed stare. Even people he liked looked deranged. From a professional perspective, the trouble was you could never see enough of the person you were in conversation with to gauge their body language. They might be giving off all sort of signals you’d be aware of in what his boss had taken to calling “F2F encounters,” but the Skype interface could hide a multitude of clues.
Val McDermid
Ask yourself the three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything. 1) Does this need to be said 2) “Does this need to be said by me? 3) Does this need to be said by me now?
Craig Ferguson
No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another
Robert Barr
He was highly spoken of, everybody knew; but nobody knew who had spoken highly of him…
Mrs. Oliphant
Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.
Sara Sheridan
We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.
Sara Sheridan
The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.
James Robertson
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
Ali Smith
I would I were in the kingdom of heaven if it be as you and Mr. Graham take it for!" said Clementina."You must be in it, my lady, or you couldn't wish it to be such as it is.""Can one be in it and yet seem to himself to be out of it. Malcolm?""So many are out of it that seem to be in it, my lady, that one might well imagine it the other way around with some.
George MacDonald
... something wholly new in religious thought. All other heavens have been gardens, dreamlands: passivities, more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves, heaven is a siesta and not a city.The heaven of Christianity is different from all other heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working life of the world... Try to restore the natural force of the expression - suppose John to have lived today and to have said 'I saw a new London.
Henry Drummond
Do I believe in Heaven and Hell? I do, we have them here; the world is nothing else.
John Davidson
And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.
Ali Smith
We are home to each other now.
Sara Sheridan
This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I've never been away, but, on the other hand, I'm getting this constrictive feeling as well. It's the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can't decide if this is good or bad.
Iain Banks
Oblige me by telling me where I am.""That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.
George MacDonald
What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.
Sara Sheridan
In wartime, she thought to herself, you don’t call a death murder.
Sara Sheridan
It is much more difficult to deal with the truth about your life when you have no idea that you have feet of clay and it suddenly begins to rain.
Sheila Walsh
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It's trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there's no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that's my view.
Robert Louis Stevenson
No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.
Grant Morrison
I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.
Sara Sheridan
History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.
Sara Sheridan
I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.
Sara Sheridan
I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.
Sara Sheridan
But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.
Andrew Lang
I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with “BANG! Expand! Sssss…,” then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…
Iain M. Banks
Emotion is not simply an overplus of feeling; it is life lived at white-heat, a state of wonder. To lose wonder is to lose the true element of religion.
Oswald Chambers