Laidlaw Quotes

“I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“But there are two basic kinds of professional, Harkness saw in a moment of self-congratulatory illumination. There’s the professionalism that does something well enough to earn a living from it. And there’s the professionalism that creates a commitment so intense that the earning of a living happens by the way. Its dynamic isn’t wages but the determination to do something as well as it can be done.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“His face looked like an argument you couldn't win.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“The old man opened the door with all the ease of the Venus de Milo cracking a safe.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“I don’t have fights. I have wars.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“This room was the resort of men who hadn’t much beyond a sense of themselves and weren’t inclined to have that sense diminished. Harkness recognised a feeling he had experienced in other East-End pubs, and understood precisely where the tension came from. It came from the realisation that just by coming in you had shucked the protection of your social status. In this place your only credentials were yourself.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer. The scene was a kind of Method School of Weather—a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“She was the perfect end to a crappy day, brusque, supercilious and precisely as pleasant as a boil on the sphincter.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“I mean if everybody could waken up tomorrow morning and have the courage of their doubts, not their convictions, the millennium would be here. I think false certainties are what destroy us. And Milligan’s full of them. He’s a walking absolute. What’s murder but a willed absolute, an invented certainty? An existential failure of nerve. What we shouldn’t do is compound the felony in our reaction to it. And that’s what people keep doing. Faced with the enormity, they lose their nerve, and where”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“Aye. He was very nice there. The rest of my life’ll be an anti-climax.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“The road, it seemed, was a river and he was the only one who knew the stepping-stones.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“They made Lennie feel like an actor who has wandered into the wrong play.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“putting your faith in Milligan is just a fancy term for despair.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“can protect the relatives of the victim from atavism.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“A crime you’re trying to solve is a temporary”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“don’t have fights. I have wars.’ To Harkness”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“Laidlaw had seen that quality of arbitrarily shifting perspective before, always in people whose environment was putting them under pressure. It was as if they had been overtaken by the hardness of their experience and mugged by it, so that they lived the rest of their lives concussed.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

“Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt.”
― William McIlvanney, Laidlaw