Quotes About Edinburgh

At seven years old, I won a scholarship to George Heriot's School, an independent school in Edinburgh, and I was there until I was 17.

Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.

Edinburgh is a world city, visited throughout the year for its beauty and history, but in August, it is the City of Hope. There is something very exciting and romantic about performers of all shapes and sizes, honing their stuff for the biggest arts festival in the world.

I grew up in Edinburgh, but my dad's from Glasgow, and my mum's from Chingford in Essex, and I spent time in Ireland, too, so I was always somebody who absorbed accents. I would come back from visits, very much to the annoyance of friends and family, with an accent based on where I'd been.

But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer.

I was at a pharmaceutical conference in Dallas and bored out of my head. I'd split up from my missus and went downtown and had my kids' initials done, JLD, for Joseph, Luke and Daniel. Then I got back with my wife so I had her initials added during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - after I'd waited a few years to see if the marriage would work!

What I loved about Edinburgh was being able to walk to work through a beautiful place.

I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around, so I don't think I'm a very big deal.

I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.

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?

Edinburgh has a similar climate to Bergen - it's very rainy and grey. There were a lot of days I'd sit inside in front of the computer, make music, and dream about summer - instead of the rainy reality outside.

Meanwhile Sir Wat Scott of Buccleuch was riding westward from Edinburgh, free at last of the Governor's councils, and leaving behind him his good friend Tom Erskine, a distraught smuggler, and a depressed pig.

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.

Edinburgh is a phenomenal location for movies and should be used more.

I used to say Edinburgh was a beautiful actress with no talent. I thought it was just like a shortbread tin. I think that's because I did six Festivals in a row there, and I never saw the real Edinburgh, just a lot of deeply annoying Cambridge Footlights kids wanting to be actresses.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to Edinburgh a few times over the last few years, and I just loved the city. I find it one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.

When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.

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

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

I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.

I was going to do medicine at Edinburgh University - when I was three weeks old I nearly died, but they did an operation and I survived. It was a huge thing for my family - I was the first-born - and doctors were heroes, so I wanted to join them.

It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen… New Orleans. Mark Twain

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.