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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.

Irvine Welsh

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Irvine Welsh
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: September 27
Author
Film Actor
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Although
Realize
Realizing
Rather
Precedents
Understand
Precedent
Often
Recognise
Always
Behaviour
Never
Context

More quotes by Irvine Welsh

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I think just getting up and getting to the desk is a big thing. If you can do that, you're in the zone because there're so many distractions that can stop you. From my bedroom to my office isn't really that far, but I have to go via the kitchen and there's so many things that can stop me and interrupt me.
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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.
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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.
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The first of the Trainspotting crew to die. Out of the five of them like, Begbie, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and [Margaret] Thatcher. Who'd have thunk she'd have been the first to go? She was the invisible author of the book, really. She created the conditions and the hubris whereby that whole culture flourished.
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In the cross-over, you get to a point where you realize that you've got all this genetic inheritance, and you've got all this social conditioning, but there is a point where you do have to make a choice, and that's the optimist in me: you have the freedom to make a choice about how you are going to be, and what you're going to do.
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I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.
Irvine Welsh
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There's nothing worse than a violent beating from an unremarkable person. Physical violence with someone is too much like shagging them. Too much id involved.
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In civic life, I think that's where you can debate what is good taste and what is acceptable to other people, and what's gonna offend people. Do that there, but leave it out of art, because art is the one frontier that shouldn't have restraints put on it.
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Most people with good jobs, middle-class occupations, what have you, are only one pitfall away from social embarrassment and destitution. It's so precarious. Even salaried people in the West now feel this sense of being trapped, not having the freedom to strike out.
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Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.
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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.
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I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.
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Everything in the street today seems soft focus.
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The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That's what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana's funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.
Irvine Welsh
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I think [Ecstasy] was a really good stab. It wasn't my strongest book or my strongest material, but they wanted to make a kinda rave culture movie.
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How many shots does it take before the concept ay choice becomes obsolete?
Irvine Welsh
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You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.
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If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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Love does not exist, it's like religion, the state wants you to believe in that kind of crap so they can control you, and f**k your head up.
Irvine Welsh