Alan Sillitoe



Alan Sillitoe (March 4, 1928 – April 25, 2010) was an English novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, essayist and poet, who first came to prominence as one of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s.

Quotes

 * Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about.
 * "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" (1958), from New and Collected Stories (1958; repr. London: Robson, 2003), p. 8.


 * I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.
 * "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", from New and Collected Stories (1958; repr. London: Robson, 2003), p. 24.


 * Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me.  You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't.
 * Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; repr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. 144.


 * Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.
 * Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as quoted by the Arctic Monkeys in the title of their album.


 * You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.
 * The Death of William Posters (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 87.

Criticism

 * Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion.
 * Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1973] 1975) vol. 1, p. 337.


 * Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party.
 * The Daily Telegraph, reviewing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; cited from The Bookseller, October 25, 1958, p. 1641.
 * Also used as a tagline for the 1960 film adaptation.