“I love Scotland and I speak about it a lot, so people think I’m desperate to go back. They just take it upon themselves to say I’m going back, but I’m not. I’d rather concentrate on becoming a citizen of the world.”

Killing a guy and stealing his wife and child isn’t too nice a thing to do.

Save the Trees? Trees are the main cause of Forest Fires!

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?

I’d always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.

Now, the country is in a terrible state, and you’ve blamed it on a number of things: Unemployment rate, the value of the pound and all that… wrll, it’s because the national anthem is boring.

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

When you involved in an accident and someone asks “are you alright?” Yes fine thanks, I’ll just pick up my limbs and be off.

I am totally, absolutely romantic. When I broke up with a girl I would listen to the most heart-breaking music and make it worse. That’s what girls do. I think I am a girl really.

Well, the film’s not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it’s pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies.

The human race has been set up. Someone, somewhere, is playing a practical joke on us. Apparently, women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. How do we ever get started.

The religion in Scotland is one of the most patronising things… after the weather.

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it’s not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

I think of my life as a series of moments and I’ve found that the great moments often don’t have too much to them.

I’m not going to throw away the hand of friendship to suit 100 Trotskyites in Glasgow.

I hate those earnest TV documentaries that are the world according to people with glasses who know better than you.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can’t always hear what people in the audience are saying.

Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear.

My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.