Glasgow City Quotes

Welcome to Glasgow - the city where we punch people who are on fire.

Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Glasgow is maybe the most bullshit-free place on earth. I think I call it "the antidote to the rest of the world." It's so unapologetically working class and attitude-free. Everyone's looking "to take the piss out of you," as they put it. They're all comedians, and tough. They don't put on airs.

We make this fucking city run and they want to run us out.

From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him. ‘What is this place?’ he thought. A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard…It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day.

Another man of sheer violence was the late Stewart Boyd, he was killed in a car accident over in Spain’s Costa del Sol shortly after being released from prison in June 2003. But he certainly left his mark on the city streets of Glasgow. He was a force to be reckoned with, a gang enforcer. Murder and witness intimidation were high on his criminal charge sheet.

Possil — and other areas like it, in other cities — has been in that state for so long that it now gives birth to itself. No chance of revolution now — the anger is muted and turned inwards. Possil picks at its own sores. When somebody manages to get a new car, somebody else is bound to torch it. But it doesn’t occur to them to head out to Bearsden or Newton Meams, the places where the nobs live, and torch a few Mercs or Rolls Royces. They don’t do it to the people whose opinion matters. They only do it to each other. And who in Newton Mearns cares if a bunch of schemies on the other side of town burn their own property? And so Possil, and Maryhill, and Easterhouse, and Drumchapel all stay the same.

Glasgow is more than body and more than head; She is both head and body. Her air of independent and self-contained metropolitanism - different from, and balancing, that of London - is the first thing that strikes the stranger who visits her after seeing the English provincial cities. And though most of the human elements of this metropolitanism [have been drawn from all Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and even from the Continent and Judaea, Glasgow is vitally self supporting to a greater extent than any other very large city; and while, by means of trade, travel, and intellectual sympathy, the sphere of her civic interests is in actuality the whole world, in immediate appearance it is frontiered by the city's wide boundaries.

A socialist member from Glasgow, John McGovern, delivered the most pointed attack of the day, going so far as to criticize Churchill’s practice of visiting bombed cities. He said, “When we have got to the stage when the Prime Minister has to parade himself through every bombed area in the country, and has to sit on the back of a wagonette waving his hat on a stick like a ‘Doodles’ at the circus—well, it has come to a very sad state of affairs when representatives of the Government are not so sure of the opinions of the people of the country.” McGovern professed to have no confidence in the war or the government, adding, “And, while I have a tremendous admiration for the oratorical powers of the Prime Minister, who can almost make you believe that black is white, I have no faith in his achieving anything of lasting benefit to humanity.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

Who the fuck are you?” said the manager in a voice that was both metallic and gun-shaped. He was a man in his mid-fifties, balding, with thick eyebrows and a large square mouth set in a permanent sneer like a lopsided Ikea catalog. This would never happen back home, Tooley thought. Guns were seldom used except by the hardened career-criminal. There was a kind of understanding in the poorer parts of Glasgow that if you couldn't use your hands to get what you want you were a bit of a namby-pamby. Weapons were a sign of weakness.

We embarked on a twelve-city North American promotion tour, and then hit London, Dublin, and Glasgow. To buzz us around, MGM provided the corporate jet, with a crocodile painted on the side. It was a whirlwind tour. Bindi would get into a limousine in one city, we would carry her sleeping onto the plane, and then she would wake up in a limousine in a different city. It was nonstop. My sister Bonnie came with us to care for Bindi while Steve and I did interviews, one after another, from the morning shows to late-night television. We spoke as well with reporters from newspapers, magazines, and radio programs. Over the course of six weeks, we did twelve hundred interviews. Our publicist, Andrew Bernstein, gave Steve one of his favorite compliments. “I’ve never seen anybody promote a movie harder,” he said, “except maybe Tom Cruise.

Even Ulysses,” said Nicola. “Babies love Scotch Pies over in Glasgow. That’s what they feed them over there.” “Do they give them Irn Bru in their baby bottles?” asked Bertie. Nicola smiled. “Possibly, Bertie. They do a lot of things differently in Glasgow. It’s a city of great character.

I create music. To this day, I have listeners and followers spread throughout the multiverse. From Egypt to the Netherlands to Japan; from Daejeon to Gwangju to Dhaka; from Munich to Glasgow to Indonesia to France; from the city of Bemusal, to the Raging Depths, Havastal, and the Sand Hermit Bay. From planet Earth, to planet Annai , to planet Roidio. From the fryadector, Noot, to the tredicidector, Hamstar. From Sector A to Sector Z.

Oh, my beautiful city, I am so in love with you just now.

Glasgow was often rated as one of the happiest cities in the world, possibly because the people who researched these things didn’t understand sarcasm.

Glasgow can be uncommonly dreich, smirr blurring the architectural mishmash of the city's skyline. The east coast plays host to some truly cruel gales, eroding the sharp edges off fishermen's cottages in Fife and Angus. In the winter months it can feel like the country takes any opportunity to grind to a halt. The faintest threat of snow causes chaos across road, rail and air.

Where was she now? in a middle-aged marriage? did she live in this city still? He had a sudden urge to see her, as if he might retrieve by looking at her the ferocious sensation of that kiss, that moment –

The other day, in the course of one of those more or less clandestine visits to the city on the Clyde I make from time to time, I was walking down Buchanan Street when I came smack up against something I'd never seen before: that sculpture of a big bird struggling into flight called Concept of Kentigern. Maybe Glasgow is about ready to leave its status as industrial mastadon of the Western world and fly over into other dimensions. Maybe there's a good time coming.

Anne and I took a train in one day to meet Jamesy Black, a guy she had known in Glasgow. He was a fellow student of hers at the art school and had married an impossibly glamorous American fashion model named Lucy. They lived on Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth streets, which, during the early and mid-1980s, was one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in New York City. We met Jamesy at the Odessa, that wonderful café on Avenue A. I had never been to the East Village before. I thought I’d died and gone to punk-rock heaven. There were Goths and junkies and rockers everywhere, mixed in with the scary street-life people. The whole neighborhood seemed alive with a tangible, cinematic danger. Everywhere I looked was a movie set—there