Top 66 Irvine Welsh Quotes

I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it’s finished. They say, ‘Where’s the book you were going to write?’ And I say, ‘Forget about it. It doesn’t exist.’

Politicians are so… detested; they don’t actually walk amongst people now.

Writing has been handed to me on a plate.

The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.

Rebellion is always going to fascinate, as it’s always packaged in a very safe way.

It’s that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they’re not.

People should be able to express their culture without getting into all that chauvinistic thing.

‘Ulysses’ is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.

Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That’s always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places.

When I’m not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I’ve been writing quite constantly lately so I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction – philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

We want to feel hyper-alive, and it’s like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It’s like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling.

I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.

I think what you call ‘metropolitan America’ – as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles – I think there’s more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there’s the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It’s more formulaic.

Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist – the legitimiser of our egos.

We’ve become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there’s a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There’s so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

It’s like nothing’s really happening. Our culture is almost dead.

It’s part of me, Scotland. I’m still immersed in it even though I am not there.

I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.

The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.

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.

Sometimes a book influences me because it winds me up. There’ll be something that gets under my skin and makes me think that I can do better.

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.

The ’90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show.

As soon as you’ve written it, you’re thinking about how it can move into different mediums.

I’ve been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing.

I don’t perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It’s pure self-indulgence.

I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There’s this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

I just want to get on and tell stories.

It’s been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you’re doing is not any kind of public show, until you’re ready for it.

What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.

Writers in Britain aren’t really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set.

Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That’s how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn’t making any kind of political statement.

I go to the gym and work through a routine. But if you see someone with a personal trainer, you know they do 10 times more than you do. You give up your sense of identity. If you watch ‘The Biggest Loser,’ you see people give up their identity to become something else.

A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes.

In my flat in Chicago, I’ve got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by.

How can you be inspired by Cameron and Miliband? These guys are just drabness personified.

I’m a failed musician rather than a successful writer.

It’s really odd that I’ve got this kind of sullen reputation – I never saw myself that way.

People think if you’re working class, there has to be some fascist element underneath.

Before I started writing, I’d never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I’m taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.

The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.

I would never have written ‘Trainspotting’ if it hadn’t been for this album, ‘Raw Power,’ and ‘Metallic K.O.’

I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.

Boxing gives you such a good workout, although I’ve stopped sparring. When your hand speed goes, you’re going to get caught, and you can’t afford to take cumulative smacks on the chops when you’re a writer.

Dean Owens is Scotland’s most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter.

Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.

Sometimes there’s a snobbery among literary types that these people don’t really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There’s a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

When you grow up in a place, you always think it’s mundane. Then you travel around and live in different places, and you realise that you’ve got it the wrong way ’round.

Writing is such a good thing to do because you can’t really get bored with it. If you’re bored with writing, you’re bored with life.

I’m always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don’t see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.

It’s very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.

I feel like I’ve exhausted guys and male friendships.

I’d always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn’t getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.

I have a lot of successful musician pals, and as I get older, I find that I’m lucky to be a writer. I have great anonymity compared to musicians who sell the same number of records as I do books.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a book. I’m not a writer, but I’ve got a great story.’

When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid £17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set.

I didn’t have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.

I used to sit on the Circle Line and go ’round and ’round and write.