People From Glasgow

"Because I was involved in controversy, people saw me as controversial. Because the industry is about personalities, people thought Linn was about personalities."

"On New Labour: The worst government we've had to date, with a total lack of understanding of every area of expertise we have in this country, of the unique skills that should be nurtured and protected. They don't give a stuff about manufacturing because they believe it is redundant in the new world of services. I'd like them to commit mass suicide."

"On the taxman and other regulators: We are now suffering from four simultaneous investigations by separate tax and regulation authorities. We are constantly harassed and abused by these people. Usually they end up owing us money. I can't find anybody who runs a foreign-owned subsidiary who has anything like the aggro we have."

"On competitivity and delocalisation of manufacturing: No, we are Scots people up here. We are not going to be driven out of our own country. The notion that if you become more prosperous and your people command a higher salary it makes you less competitive is one I find deeply offensive,'."

"On the EU: An act of collective insanity. We don't belong in Europe and the French and the Germans occasionally reveal their hatred of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. They hate Britain and America."

"On the euro: They are rebuilding the Soviet Union. Even though we in the UK are now developing the bureaucracy, the black economy and the corruption essential for participation in the new European superstate, I don't think it is something the British people will want or welcome."

"On opportunities: People equate survival in Britain with success. If you are still around you must be doing OK. Nobody sees the lost opportunities. We are the world leaders in creating lost opportunities."

"Drug abuse is a lottery. I have never taken drugs and it is only by the grace of God that I did not turn to them. Their prohibition gives them a taboo quality and makes them attractive. I am just so disappointed and deeply unimpressed by this government. They are driven by pragmatism rather than taking a stand on the issue, having the confidence to do what needs to be done. They must be legalised. I believe that passionately."

"On the Scottish Parliament: A total catastrophe. Scotland has now become a kind of communistic backwater. They have unwound hundreds of years of progress in a few years, and we are heading for oblivion as a country."

"Business 101: Other people heard it and said if you make them, we'll sell them... I made them, they sold them, but they never paid me - which was my first lesson in business."

"On people: Not every young man was designed by Mother Nature to sit behind a desk working for the tax people or one of these other bull***t organisations... Some of us were designed to go out and fight people, capture animals, to have an outlet for these energies."

"I foolishly assumed that if the thing measured better, it should sound better. I also assumed that if it didn't sound any better, there was no point in buying it."

"On a favourite way to spend a day in Scotland: One of Scotland's great experiences is sailing into Tobermoray after a week long cruise down the western isles. It is a bit like sailing into Manhatten on the QEII and seeing all the skyscrapers but after Stornoway, Skalpy Harris and Barra, Tobermoray is more impressive."

"There’s a theory that if you have an interesting childhood then you have enough material to last a lifetime. But that implies that art is always autobiographical when reinvention and imagination are the most important elements. But it doesn’t hurt to have a mad family! Of course I didn’t notice until I’d escaped – when I left home as a teenager on a diplomatic scholarship – how odd my family were."

"Life-affirming people are a bit creepy and self-consciously life-affirming art is usually awful. My books tend to have happy endings, or at least that’s one way of reading them. My characters are exuberant and funny as well as dark. Duality is the essence of my voice so it’s appropriate for me to have an evil twin to blame things on."

"Books were banned from my house, my mum thought they were ‘germ traps’, so I was always sneaking into the library, hiding under a big plant; reading. I was escaping into another world as well as finding out stuff that was news to me."

"Murder and sex are both Dionysian. Creative work is first anarchic; and then it’s structured. It’s right brain then left brain. Anarchic then controlled. To be a really good writer, you have to be able to do both. It’s hard work and it takes longer than murder or sex."

"I like being described as "Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour." But I wouldn’t marry Ted Hughes. He’s dead for one thing."

"Carole Morin has enough autobiography to last her a lifetime. 90 per cent of it comprises Dead Glamorous — or at least the 90 per cent she claims to be true. The rest is obfuscation and exaggeration, designed to give her already improbable tale the sheen of some glorious myth."

"With her ‘grotesque gallery’ of relatives I wonder why she even bothers to make things up."

"Writing things down is dangerous. Ink can’t be erased without leaving a mess behind."

"Betrayal is a cliché … Lies are so suburban. But murder is nice and clean."

"God isn’t in the details, He’s in the structure."

"Writing is prophesy. Don’t write anything unless you want it to come true."

"Imagination is all we have in the end."

"I wanted to wake up with a new name, a new hair colour, and almost the same heart."

"A sinning nun, her face in a plate of cakes, caught my eye as I descended on the moving stair."

"Writing is hard work. Even when you start with the raw ingredients – a mad family, a sense of humour, talent…it’s hard work. But you do get to sit around in silk pyjamas all day."

"I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake. The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!"

"I fell in love with money before I had any and it’s a myth that the best romances end in heartbreak."

"The sum of the rivals is constant."

"God for all anyone knows could be Cary Grant."

"Irene the Slut sits on top of the television, the atmosphere of Russian vodka about her skin."

"I wouldn’t want to be labelled a Woman Writer even though I’m definitely not a man. And I think Scottish Writer has some unfortunate associations. Last century when I was commissioned to write my first novel, Scottish writers were being bullied by a purple nosed publisher to write in dialect. Well my voice is authentically Scottish. I’m an educated Scottish person who escaped. My voice is as valid as a whiny cunt who lives in a council flat and doesn’t quite speak English. That doesn’t mean I have to sound like Evelyn Waugh either. I’d like to be called a Good Writer. To quote a review on Amazon, "Carole Morin is a Fucking Genius. Fact." Fucking Genius will do."

"Lies are easy to believe in but the truth sounds false."

"It’s all real. It came out of my head. Everything in there is real. Even the things invented and imagined."

"I think about toilets a lot, and how awful it must be to be a toilet."

"Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in. Of course Vivien Lash has things in common with me but if she actually was me I wouldn’t have been able to invent her. And I’m not plotting to murder my husband! The closest connection between me and my characters is that we live in a city that’s recognisable as London, but it’s a version of London that came out of my head."

"In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s 'finest hour'. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?"

"Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world."

"Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them."

"A defining feature of history is that there are many more black swans — not to mention what Didier Sornette calls “dragon kings,” events so large in scale that they lie beyond even a power-law distribution — than a normally distributed world would lead us to expect. All such events lie in the realm of uncertainty, not of calculable risk. Moreover, the world we have built has, over time, become an increasingly complex system prone to all kinds of random behavior, nonlinear relationships and “fat-tailed” distributions. A disaster such as a pandemic is not a single, discrete event. It invariably leads to other forms of disaster — economic, social and political. There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster. The more networked the world becomes, the more we see this."

"I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe that year (it was only three years later, in Yugoslavia, that the death of Communism sparked war), there was no such turning point in China, where 1989 also saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, the survival of Communism in China was a more significant historical phenomenon than its collapse east of the River ."

"[[George H. W. Bush|[George H. W.] Bush]] was in many ways the maestro president when it came to foreign policy. With extraordinary dexterity, he handled the , the collapse of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, German reunification and then the Soviet disintegration. On his watch, Nelson Mandela was set free and apartheid consigned to the history books; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed. And yet still the presidency was won by a scandal-prone Southern governor with the banal but brilliant slogan: "It’s the economy, stupid.""

"Trump is a demagogue and a would-be tyrant whose disregard for the rule of law and encouragement of sedition and insurrection have, very fortunately for us all, been thwarted by his own incompetence and, of course, the separation of powers and other constitutional checks the founders devised."

"I disbelieve in both cycles of history and ends of history. History is the interaction of many complex systems. There are certain long-run processes (notably exponential gains in productivity through the development of technology and the “suprasecular” decline of nominal and real interest rates as a result of capital accumulation) punctuated by, well, one disaster after another. These disasters are either randomly distributed or follow a power law (i.e. there are lots of little earthquakes, pandemics or wars, but a few cataclysmic ones). At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”"

"European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially on the centre-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable."

"Back when China and America were the best of friends — or at least when their economic relationship seemed almost symbiotic — and I came up with the idea of “Chimerica,” which unlike the rival “G2” had the advantage of being a pun on the word “chimera,” signalling that we didn’t think it could last. Well, Chimerica now looks well and truly dead. But what is taking its place? Cold Wok? Sweet and Sour War? The hunt for a catch-phrase continues. Actually, I’m not sure why I bother. In the end, it too will probably be Made in China."

"Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions."

"Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity."