Irvine Welsh Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've always felt really good about England. I've always felt really, really good about Britain.

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

It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.

We made the world uninhabitable for ourselves and it can only be inhabited by robots and androids.

Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather.

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

In some ways, you can say that at any time in any writer's career: 'He might have run out of ideas.'

Conservatives are giving up on democracy because it's not efficient. They want an autocratic regime.

If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about.

It wis like auld times, but in a sense that only served tae remind us ay how much things hud changed.

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

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

Just lock myself in a room, stop answering emails, stop answering the phone and I come out with something.

The subsequent success levels, all the other stuff [after Trainspotting], it comes at a much higher level.

Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.

Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.

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

[Margaret Thatcher] was the invisible hand behind it. Without that, there'd be no Trainspotting and no Filth.

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

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

If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction.

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

Most people in the West are not politicized. They're the most simplistic consumers - they're animals, basically.

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

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

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

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 don't think that the Scots are happy to drift into Britain becoming the poorest of the poor, sub-American 51st state.

[Ecstasy] had its flaws, but again it was shot on a low budget, and they did well. It's not in the same league as Filth.

Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.

It's very hard to transgress; we have the furniture of transgression without the imagery and iconography to actually do it.

Rents once sais, thirs nothin like a darker skin tone tae increase the vigilance ay the police n the magistrates: too right.

It was quite life-affirming, for me, that I felt hat kind of pity for [Margaret Thatcher], because I didn't think I ever would.

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

His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.

Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know.

It's all been quite a revitalizing process for me, being out there in the States. It wouldn't have happened without Trainspotting.

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 America I think we need to move towards a social democracy, European-style basically, and I think that in Britain we do as well.

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