Literary Birthday – 28 December – Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray was born on 28 December 1934 and died on 29 December 2019.

Alasdair Gray Quotes

1. Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
2. 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.
3. A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.
4. 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.
5. People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer, or brain surgeon.

Alasdair Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. Gray is regarded as the father figure of the Scottish Renaissance. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on the politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His first novel, the surreal and atmospheric Lanark: A Life in Four Books, is regarded as a classic. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction, and he used slipstream fiction techniques in his writing. Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 2001 he became a professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow. He popularised the epigram ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ which was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004.

Source for Image: Günter Prust, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alasdair_Gray_(1994)_by_Guenter_Prust.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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