William McIlvanney Quotations

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable.

We must improve the shared conditions in which we live, of course, but the essential purpose of that will be in order to inhabit more fully the necessary and unalterable terms of our existence. Take away the avoidable injustices of some lives that we may humanly share in the unavoidable injustice that is in all our lives.

Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided.

Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings, or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.