I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.

Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.

I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough.

I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent—

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.

Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses.

It's so important for kids to get involved with sports in general at a young age.

Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Coffee doesn't do it for me; it's running that gets me going.

We're far from having too much horsepower...my definition of too much horsepower is when all four wheels are spinning in every gear.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

I couldn't direct because I'm too impatient and I couldn't put together a package because I don't understand money. I'd rather just do what I'm doing.

If you look at the natural world, really look at it, it's always magical.

We must not settle for an informed mind without an engaged heart.

So I'm not very popular here with those inside the system, as you might guess. I never wanted to be.