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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

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Irvine Welsh
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: September 27
Author
Film Actor
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Sound
Statement
Making
Statements
Political
Seemed
Character
Characters
Kind
Wasn
Way
Started
Came
Pretentious
Literature
Sounded

More quotes by Irvine Welsh

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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.
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I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.
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I think there is a natural thing that you feel when you've written something taboo because you just don't want to expose the people you're close to.
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It's all been quite a revitalizing process for me, being out there in the States. It wouldn't have happened without Trainspotting.
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I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
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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.
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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.
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How stagnant and tepid the whole British political scene is now is just beyond belief.
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When I go to places and do book tours, I don't really like doing traditional bookshops. It's nice to walk people through something instead of just standing up in a bookstore.
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
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I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.
Irvine Welsh
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[Ecstasy] had its flaws, but again it was shot on a low budget, and they did well. It's not in the same league as Filth.
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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I'm not running away, I'm moving on.
Irvine Welsh
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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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.
Irvine Welsh
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I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.
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 many shots does it take before the concept ay choice becomes obsolete?
Irvine Welsh
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I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.
Irvine Welsh