"Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know."

"... Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless."

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"With the gift of faith, we move on."

"The best way ah knew tae strike a chord without compromising too much tae the sickening hypocrisy, perversely peddled as decency, which fills the room, is tae stick tae the clich s."

"But ah cannae even endorse these sentiments as they are at best peripheral tae the moment."

"Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror."

"I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs."

"-Fiona, this is my mate, Frank Begbie. Or Franco. Or Beggars. Or the Beggar Boy. Or the Generalissmo. Or Psychotic Bullying Prick."

"It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments."

"I reach into my bag and I pull out my claw hammer."

"Ah didnae really know much aboot women. Ah didnae really know much aboot anything."

"Living like this is a full-time business."

"His mind was like a cruel prison, giving his captive soul a sight of freedom, but no more"

"— Square go then smart cunt!"

"We're all like the slaves in the fields now, putting on the front that says 'Everything's fine, boss' while we worry about how to make ends meet."

"The politics of the last twenty years in Britain are liars' politics. The problem is we are ruled by the weak and the small-minded, who are too stupid to know that they are weak and small-minded."

"We tend to be rather murky little ponds, containing many layers of suspended dirt and grime and our greatest depths are stirred by the strangest of currents."

"Drugs are always fun."

"Money gives you the luxury of not caring about it. You can affect to find it crass and vulgar, but see how crass and vulgar it is when there’s none of it in your pocket."

"I wouldn't care about hurting myself or anybody else. Because I know now that doing things doesn't hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them"

"His mind raced through past horrors experienced first hand and from the accounts of others. He mentally flipped through a grim database which contained everything from vegan flatmates to psychotic pimps."

"Ah took a pish oan the cunt, then ah felt bad aboot Albo's cel so ah sais tae him oan the wey oot, cunt's only went n pished hissel but, eh."

"It seemed that young people, despite their fundamental decency, now had to buy into a mind-set which made viciousness and treachery come easy."

"-The renegade robots are now long dead, the metal ones rusted, the human ones bled."

"Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n аw. That's it; end ay fuckin story."

"They mean well, and they mean well tae me, but there's nae way under the sun that they can appreciate what ah feel, what ah need. Protect me from those who wish tae help us."

"Without this kickstart to my day, I'd be lost. A day without a morning run is a day you fumble through, rather than one you attack."

"No ambition but to use up the big wages on more drink and more hopeless horses."

"Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well."

"Why did I join the force? I repeat, - Oh I'd have to say that it was due to police oppression. I'd witnessed it within my own community and decided that it was something I wanted to be part of, I smile."

"His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life."

"But ah'm hugging Janey and thinking about how much a life can change in the time it takes tae fix up."

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?"

"The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner."

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."

"One reads alone, even in another's presence."

"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?"

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"Falsehood is never in words; it is in things."

"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

"The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."

"Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say."

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

"I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains."

"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."