You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.
It seemed to him a very Edinburgh thing. Welcoming, but not very.
A good album should be more than the sum of its parts.
[About a tiresome colleague]: He could bore for Scotland.
My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.
Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.