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.

Alasdair Gray

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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 seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

Alasdair Gray

Mots clés poetry writing

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Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.

Alasdair Gray

Mots clés writing

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One day after the exams, the teachers sat at their desks correcting papers while the pupils read comics, played chess or cards or talked quietly in groups. Coulter at a desk in front of Thaw turned round and said, "What are ye reading?"

Thaw showed a book of critical essays on art and literature.

Coulter said accusingly, "You don't read that for fun."

"Yes, I read it for fun."

"People our age don't read that sort of book for fun. They read it to show they're superior."

"But I read this sort of book even when there's nobody around to see me."

"That shows you arenae trying to make us think you're superior, you're trying to make yourself think you're superior.

Alasdair Gray

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He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.

Alasdair Gray

Mots clés materialism potato sensitive-artiste

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