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The first job of a writer is to be honest.

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
First
Writer
Honest
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More quotes by Irvine Welsh

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You have to let people express themselves in the way that they need to express themselves. You have to express yourself in any way possible, provided you're prepared to live with the consequences.
Irvine Welsh
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If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.
Irvine Welsh
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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How stagnant and tepid the whole British political scene is now is just beyond belief.
Irvine Welsh
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Everything in the street today seems soft focus.
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.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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If you continue to transfer the wealth of the population of the planet to a very small amount of people, it becomes untenable at some point, a democracy, because people eventually will realize what's going on. You can only bulls - t people through kinds of media outlets for so long, and eventually you have to physically control them.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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In America, we've got to get back to these base principles of what democracy is.
Irvine Welsh
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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'.
Irvine Welsh
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I think of the women I know, and very few of them are obsessed with shopping, or with getting a guy - they want their own thing, they have their own network going on.
Irvine Welsh
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Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.
Irvine Welsh
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Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.
Irvine Welsh
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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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.
Irvine Welsh