Top 90 Irvine Welsh Quotes

I’m not really a mainstream novelist!

When a town doesn’t have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.

It was around the summer of 1982 when the drug problem really impacted. It became a lifestyle rather than a recreation. When you start lying and stealing, you cannot con yourself you’re in control any more.

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

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

People in Scotland want the parliament but don’t give a toss about the elections.

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.

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

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.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.

I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That’s what I hate about all this technology.

People either think I’m this totally savage, idiot-savant genius guy who‘s lucked out or they think I’m a super-manipulative crafty businessman, this kind of MBA guy who’s spotted a gap in the market and knows how to create a product for it. It’s flattering, but I’ve not got that much of a gameplan.

I don’t want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?

Every kind of book I’ve written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven‘t re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That’s what makes it what it is.

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they’ll write what they feel.

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.

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.

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 think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum – the play in the middle – while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.

Writing has been handed to me on a plate.

For ‘Filth,’ we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.

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 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.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I’m writing I don’t like to read other fiction.

I’ve eaten ice cream from all over the world, but until you’ve tasted Graham‘s from Geneva, Illinois, you haven’t had ice cream at all.

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.

You’re on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you’re spending all this time with people who don’t actually exist, which is just madness.

You know what it’s like: you don’t want to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you would do differently.

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.

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.’

Holy Joy were a cult ’80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown.

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.

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

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

A lot of people pulled me up after ‘Trainspotting’ for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.

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

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

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

There is nothing, really, that I wouldn’t write about, and I do write about a lot of grim things.

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.

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.

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.

From ‘Trainspotting’ to ‘Acid House,’ I moved from urban realism into fantasy.

The first job of a writer is to be honest.

It’s where you come from that’s the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.

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.

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.

It’s ironic that the growth of Scottish nationalism has precipitated in the English the sort of hand-wringing the Scots have always done over who they are.

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

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

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.

Hugo Boss is my kind of label.

I’m the worst employer I could wish for because I push myself hard.

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

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.

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

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

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

There’s something about the modern era where it’s very hard to transgress – we’re all so online, easier to track by mobile phone – so you have people who do it on your behalf.

I think the silences we have on some issues are inductive of the fact that we need to write about them more, but I think there are some issues you have to write in a sensitive way and in a way that respects the reality of the situation. If you can’t do that, you should leave them alone.

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

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.

Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.

Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it’s 4 A.M.

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

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

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 just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me.

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

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

Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically.

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.’

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, ‘Are they the character in the book?’ You just can’t help it; it’s the way people are.

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’m working on a screenplay right now for the BBC, but I hope to have the decks cleared soon so I can get into the studio with my pals and put down some more tracks, try to get a strong dance single together.

In America, Miramax are using a ‘New York Times‘ review that said ‘Trainspotting’ makes ‘Kids’ look like a 1960s episode of ‘Sesame Street.’

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

Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that’s changing.

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

You can’t satirise darts, because it’s hyper-real as it is; there’s already enough over-the-top madness to it.

I tried to write ‘Trainspotting’ in standard English, but people weren’t talking like that.

Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.

When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I’d generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they’d turn into novels. I was biased toward music.

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

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

So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle.

I’m probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr. Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn’t appeal at all.

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.

Filmmaking is a much more collaborative thing than literature, so you know you’re going to be working with a group of people at the start. You know it’s going to be a compromise.