Irvine Welsh Quotes

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

Choose life … I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

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

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

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.

I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.

I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be. I believe in the class war. I believe in the battle of the sexes. I believe in my tribe. I believe in the righteous, intelligent clued-up section of the working classes against the brain-dead moronic masses as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie.

Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.

Everything in the street today seems soft focus.

don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another

But even Es and cocaine, over the years they blow holes in your brain, rob you of your memories, your past. Which is fair enough, convenient even.

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

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.

The inspiration can come in such small ways that if you sit there just waiting for the big epiphany you'll sit there for the rest of your life.

It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. Wen all this is in your head it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed.

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.

I'm not running away, I'm moving on.

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.

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.

Now, for the first time, he's seeing that there really is a way out of this, and it's all so simple. You don't have to run away. You just meet somebody special and step sideways into a parallel universe.

The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.

You can't lie to your soul.

We have to accept that capitalism is coming to an end. We can't provide paid employment for people, all the industries with technology are counter-intuitive to profit, and we have to have a transition to the conceptualist society. The only way to do it fairly is as a social democracy, a radical social democracy, which isn't compromised by neo-liberalism and isn't compromised by the rich, and isn't compromised by hegemonic, authoritarian interests: to have that balance between the government, the private sector, and then the individual citizens again.

I grew up in what was not so much a familyas a genetic disaster.

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

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.

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

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.

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.

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.

I can't stand still; I find it very difficult to sit around and do nothing. I've got to have projects on the go because the devil makes work for idle hands. I've got to be going forward all the time.

Good luck to progressive candidates in U.S. Senate elections against the usual rich, white, racist, women-hating pricks they run against.

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

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

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

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

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

People go to the big urban centres because they have a quality of life, a quality of intellectual inquiry in the big urban centres that you don't necessarily have in smaller, rural communities. I've got loads of friends and relatives that live there. People like living there, bringing up their kids there and all that stuff, but it'd be the death of me. I couldn't be in a small town, ten minutes I'd enjoy it, and then I'd get fed up because you're so constrained and constricted by it.

Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.

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 different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

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.

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.

You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too.

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.