Top 66 Edinburgh Quotes

I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence – laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter.

Being young and extremely naive and coming from a very sheltered place has been a slight disadvantage to me because in Edinburgh, if you meet someone and they’re nice, they just become your friend.

I am proud of Edinburgh’s status as a financial centre, but where is it on the index of global financial centres? Sixty-fourth. Below Hamilton, Casablanca and Mauritius. London, by contrast, is second only to New York. That’s a link worth keeping.

In 1987, I was in Edinburgh doing my first one-man show. I took part in a kickabout with some fellow comedians and tripped over my trousers and heard this cracking sound in my leg. A couple of days later I went into a coma and was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism.

I sat down to try to write ‘Edinburgh,’ an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

My alphabet book at Duddingston Primary, Edinburgh, began traditionally with ‘a is for apple,’ but when it came to ‘g,’ it was ‘g is for gas globe.’ This was in the late Fifties; there hadn’t been gas globes for decades. The textbook must have been 30 or 40 years old!

The Edinburgh Fringe is a tough beast and you do whatever you can to get through it. But it’s really the worst place to see comedians; everyone is so tense and nervous because it feels like Ofsted inspectors are out there.

Edinburgh is so cultural and such a beautiful place to walk around.

When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I’d eat ten daily – marvellous.

Indeed, the Duke of Edinburgh’s disdain for his eldest son was all the more shocking because he made little or no attempt to hide it.

The same critics who destroyed ‘Seven Streams’ when we opened in Edinburgh – and yes, it was horrible – called it one of the most important shows of the 21st century six years later in London.

I was acting before I was modelling, when I was very young, doing the Edinburgh Festival and that sort of stuff.

I have to say I like Edinburgh, but I’m not a big fan of the Festival – I like it but I’m not a massive fan.

I’d known the Duke of Edinburgh over a period of 40 years, so I’d long been accustomed to his sense of humor.

I might live in Manhattan or Edinburgh or Cardiff. I think of myself as without nationality.

Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city, and it can be a gothic horror city as well.

During the summer of 2000, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday, I asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he was hoping to reach 100. ‘Good God, no,’ he spluttered, ‘I can’t imagine anything worse. What a ghastly idea.’

My accent is… sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

Me and Greg Davies once shared a whole jar of pesto, neat, during the Edinburgh festival years ago because we had no food in the flat.

It was here in Edinburgh that in the 1980s I joined with many others to protest against Margaret Thatcher as she arrived to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Edinburgh is my adopted home. It’s a place where I wanted to come and live, and I managed to arrange my life so it happened.

My first pet at home in Edinburgh was a dog my dad had called Glen. He was a small sheepdog and went with my dad every day to work as manager of a cooking centre, which made the children’s lunches for schools.

My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.

Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

Edinburgh is the most pressurised environment to do comedy. You get an hour. There’s no compere. You’d better be on the money straight away; you’ve got journalists in.

This possibility bothered me as I thought it was not advisable to remain in one academic environment, and the long dark winters in Edinburgh could be rather dismal.

When writing about Edinburgh, I place my characters in the parts of the city that I myself have lived in, or else know well, those being the Southside, Marchmont in particular, where I lived as a student, and the New Town/Stockbridge area where I live now and have done for the past 30 years.

I sang in a rock band when I was training as a lawyer. You know, not professional, we just did it for fun. We just did gigs all over Edinburgh and some in Glasgow and some at festivals.

Don’t get me wrong, growing up in Edinburgh, I was all too familiar with the Hibs and Hearts rivalry. My father grew up in Leith – Hibee territory – just off of Easter Road on Albert Street.

There’s all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it’s a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

Going to Edinburgh when I was at university and seeing people who were my age just getting up and doing what they wanted to do, was quite a clincher for me.

Edinburgh is my favourite city. We’ll be doing a lot of children’s theatre and galleries.

I know that the Duke of Edinburgh’s rule was, ‘Don’t talk about yourself, don’t give personal interviews.’ I know that, and I know he told his children that because he told me.

I was adopted. I was born in Edinburgh, and adopted when I was about two weeks old. And it’s a good thing, I think, really, that back then, in ’75 when I was born, you were really given a lot more information than you’re given now when you’re adopted. And you know, you can access that information when you’re older.

I have got the best of both worlds; growing up in Edinburgh and now living outside Glasgow.

I think the Duke of Edinburgh would have been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to his death.

In my career, all my most important breaks have come from Edinburgh. Winning awards, being reviewed, bagging my BBCR4 series and the chance to tour has all come from Edinburgh, which begs the question, why the hell have I left it so long to come back?

In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father’s case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.

I always feel that when I come to Edinburgh, in many ways I am coming home.

I feel at home in Scotland and go back whenever I can. I’ve played the Edinburgh Festival twice, and I get the train across the Forth Bridge to Lochgelly, just to see it.

I was born in Glasgow and brought up in a place in between Glasgow and Edinburgh called West Lothian!

I love coming to Edinburgh and last time I was here, Claire and I found out we were expecting our daughter Eleanor, so it’s a place dear to my heart.

My Duke of Edinburgh interview for his 90th in June 2011 was not one of my successes. I knew what to expect: there were some very uncomfortable moments and put-downs, but I think it made for entertaining viewing.

Eleven years ago, my wife and I had had a baby, so I didn’t go to Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in years. Tim Key won the comedy award and I was sat at home with the baby feeling very jealous, genuinely.

I find Edinburgh a stimulating place in which to live, with it being a city of contrasts, both architecturally and socially, and each district having a definite character.

I’ve been to Venice, Rome, and Dubrovnik, but none of them come close to Edinburgh.

The first time I saw Tim Minchin live, it was his 2008 show ‘Ready for This?’ in a very big room at the Pleasance during the Edinburgh fringe.

In Edinburgh, there was a lovely little Episcopalian Church of Scotland church on my way to the theater, so I used to pop in there and soak up the atmosphere.

I originally went to Edinburgh for Latin, which I love and the literature is incredible, but then I suddenly realised that languages are so crucial for working in the fashion industry and it is wonderful when you can communicate with everyone.

My mother was a product of World War II. My grandfather was on leave in Edinburgh when he met my grandmother.

Shetland is the most remote place in the U.K. It’s a part our country, but completely unique. It might be British, but it’s closer to Norway than to Edinburgh, and it feels very different from the mainland.