Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by Irvine Welsh - Page 2

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Writing has been handed to me on a plate.

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

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

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

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

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

When you go away, you see where you come from in a different light. I see Scotland, and the rest of Britain, as much more exotic than I used to.

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

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

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.

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.

'True Detective' was the last show I got crazy about, with its 'Silence of the Lambs'-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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

I make out a play list for every character and buy the records they would listen to; it helps me find their personas. What they play, where they stay, who they lay, is my matrix for character development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.