Quote

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

Irvine Welsh

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Irvine Welsh
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: September 27
Author
Film Actor
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Nonfiction
Tend
Fiction
Literature
Read
Writing
Really
Like

More quotes by Irvine Welsh

Image
You can argue about violence. It's destructive, but people are inherently violent in a lot of ways. Abusing drugs is always bad for people and bad for society, but the whole notion of festival is tied up with intoxication.
Irvine Welsh
Image
I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
It's crazy for somebody who's kind of empowered and wealthy like myself to say, Oh, I don't need to be patronized by the state, I can make my own choices. But I've got things to look forward to, and places to go and if that'd been me there forty years ago, when I was a young kid in Muirhouse, it might've been a different story.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
How did it make you feel?
Irvine Welsh
Image
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
Image
It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.
Irvine Welsh
Image
The celebration of death is not a good thing. Fetishizing death isn't a good thing. You should be celebrating life and enjoying it and all that.
Irvine Welsh
Image
Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh
Image
The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.
Irvine Welsh
Image
In America, we've got to get back to these base principles of what democracy is.
Irvine Welsh
Image
Everything in the street today seems soft focus.
Irvine Welsh
Image
Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence' only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done.
Irvine Welsh
Image
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.
Irvine Welsh