James Kelman Quotes

And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye. ~ James Kelman

Folk take a battering but, they do; they get born and they get brought up and they get fuckt. That's the story; the cot to the fucking funeral pyre. ~ James Kelman

Creativity is not passive, I don't see the creation of art as passive. ~ James Kelman

In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film. ~ James Kelman

The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency. ~ James Kelman

I used to think there was something up with any female that liked me, I mean, if she didni get bored with my company, there had to be something up with her. Otherwise how come she wasni with somebody else? If she was normal she would be. Ergo she had to have a personality problem. ~ James Kelman

Obviously as a writer you have to reflect on why your work is provoking such hostility, because all you want to do is write your stories as best you can. You're forced to reflect on, why is my work so upsetting for people? The agenda behind it is clear. They don't want to see these people in literature. These areas of human experience [I write about] should not appear in public; we don't want to know. We know that people are in the street, that they have no money and are maybe begging, but we don't want to see them in literature. They should be swept under the carpet. ~ James Kelman

I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience. ~ Ian Rankin

There existed very long saxophones from years ago. The player sat on their chair like a cellist; that same sort of feeling to it as well - unlike for example the way a harpist would be: the whole act differing in a very fundamental sense. Although harpists are fine. There is nothing to be said against harpists by any means whatsoever. ~ James Kelman

Waiting rooms. Ye go into this room where ye wait. Hoping's the same. One of these days the cunts'll build entire fucking buildings just for that. Official hoping rooms, where ye just go in and hope for whatever the fuck ye feel like hoping for. ~ James Kelman

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can't ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck ... ~ James Kelman

My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that. ~ James Kelman

Funny how ye tell people a story to make a point and ye fail, ye fail, a total disaster. Not only do ye no make yer point it winds up the exact fucking opposite man, the exact fucking opposite. That isnay a misunderstanding it's a total
whatever. ~ James Kelman

We defended. We made them keep tough shots, and we executed offensively. ~ LeBron James

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa. ~ James Thurber

no more pain. wake no more. nobody owns ~ James Joyce

When Art becomes a Science it is no longer an Art. ~ Kevin James Breaux

There is a spirit of resistance implanted by the Deity in the breast of man, proportioned to the size of the wrongs he is destined to endure. ~ Charles James Fox

Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment ~ James Patterson

I guess you'll just have to get used to having a police car outside the grocery store, the gym, and wherever it is you go for lunch with your friends," Jack lectured. "And this goes without saying: you need to be careful. The police surveillance is a precautionary measure, but they can't be everywhere. You should stick to familiar surroundings, and be vigilant and alert at all times."

"I got it. No walking through dark alleys while talking on my cell phone, no running at night with my iPod, no checking out suspicious noises in the basement."

"I seriously hope you're not doing any of those things anyway."

"Of course not."

Jack pinned her with his gaze.

She shifted against the counter. "Okay, maybe, sometimes, I've been known to listen to a Black Eyed Peas song or two while running at night. They get me moving after a long day at work."

Jack seemed wholly unimpressed with this excuse. "Well, you and the Peas better get used to running indoors on a treadmill."

Conscious of Wilkins's presence, and the fact that he was watching her and Jack with what appeared to be amusement, Cameron bit back her retort.

Thirty thousand hotel rooms in the city of Chicago and she picked the one that would lead her back to him. ~ Julie James

And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The ~ James Baldwin

I've come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, ~ James C. Collins

I don't know karate, but I know crazy. ~ James Brown

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! ~ James Russell Lowell

We all got to die," she said. "But dying as your true self is always better. God'll take you however you come to Him. But it's easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You're forever free that way. From top to bottom. ~ James McBride

Roscoe Tanner seems to have found a way of making his service go even faster, so that the ball is now quite invisible, like Stealth, the American supersonic bomber which nobody has ever seen. ~ Clive James

I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize. ~ James Joseph Sylvester

I'm with Houston now. I just have to come in here and play hard and win games. ~ James Harden

So often, it's others around us who can see where God wants to grow us even before we see it ourselves. ~ James MacDonald

She means the world to me, and nothing will ever change that. ~ James Dashner

Sometimes the person who benefited most when you forgive someone was yourself. ~ Vic James

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.
Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president. ~ James Patterson

James: I think people pretty much determine their fates. I think people choose their lives.
Lucy: I don't know. I think sometimes things happen to people that are beyond their control. Things that they don't want to happen.
James: I know what you're saying. Sometimes random shit happens, but for the most part, people are where they are in life because they chose to be there. ~ Kristen Tracy

The guy's got a CCI sheet so long it begins with 'Call me Ishmael. ~ James Patterson

Blade Runner helped make my career. Everybody was in it. Who knew? ~ Brion James

I think we've always, as a species, been fascinated with stuff that we don't understand. Anytime someone can shed light on that, whether it's legit or just somebody's fantasy of what that stuff is, I think people take notice. ~ James Roday

A young man, just beginning the study of musical composition, once went to Mozart and asked him the formula for developing the theme of a symphony. Mozart suggested that a symphony was rather an ambitious project for a beginner: perhaps the young man might better try his hand at something simpler first. "But you were writing symphonies when you were my age." the student protested. "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how." ~ James Keller

Girls are under enormous pressures rarely experienced by their mothers, grandmothers, and other women in previous generations. Today's little girls are being enticed to grow up too fast and are encountering challenges for which they are totally unprepared. ~ James C. Dobson

Jack's eyes widened, then he moved closer to Cameron and put his hand on her stomach. "Does it hurt?"
She covered his hand with hers. "I'd say it's only about a point two."
Jack smiled, tenderly touching her cheek. "I knew, when we were on that rooftop, that we'd be here someday. ~ Julie James

It has occurred to me, brother, that wisdom may not be the end to everything. Goodness and kindness are, perhaps, beyond wisdom. Is it not possible that the ultimate end is music and gaiety and a dance of joy? Wisdom is the oldest of all things. Wisdom is all head and no heart.Behold, brother, you are being crushed under the weight of your head. You are dying of old age while you are yet a child. ~ James Stephens

How the fuck do you keep your hair like that? I look like a hedgehog's been humping my skull. ~ James S.A. Corey

The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. ~ James Madison

One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else - housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers - would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. ~ James Baldwin

Funny, I didn't think much about apples fore we came to the Black Swamp. when I was growin up we had an orchard like everybody else but I didn't pay it no attention cept when the blossom was out in May. Then Id go and lie there smellin some sweet perfume and listenin to the bees hum so happy cause they had flowers to play with. That was where James and I lay our first time together. I shouldve known then he wasnt for me. He was so busy inspectin my familys trees and askin how old each was - like I would know - and what the fruit was like (Juicy like me, I said) that finally I had to unbutton my dress myself. That shut him up a while. ~ Tracy Chevalier

He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora's box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The gates reopened. The vast mind restored. ~ James S.A. Corey