Irvine Welsh Quotes

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

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.

If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.

I think that there are just so many people that can't afford not to have Obama win. He's gotten so many disenfranchised people back into the political system that if he didn't win, the disillusionment in America and the idea of more of the same failed policies of the last eight years [2000-2008], internationally and domestically, would be so bad for the country and the world as a whole.

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.

Bruce, you’re an ugly and silly old man. You’re very possibly an alcoholic and God knows what else. You’re the type of sad case who preys on vulnerable, weak and stupid women in order to boost his own shattered ego. You’re a mess. You’ve gone wrong somewhere pal.

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.

You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.

How did it make you feel?

We made the world uninhabitable for ourselves and it can only be inhabited by robots and androids.

don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another

Bowie's death is a very emotional thing. My generation of working-class Britain, it feels like we lost our spiritual leader, our guru. I always thought that if I was to be a hundred, somehow Bowie would be a hundred and fifteen. He'd be there to still steer me and guide me.

Most middle-class people I know don't really live like me. Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.

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.

We have to accept that capitalism is coming to an end. We can't provide paid employment for people, all the industries with technology are counter-intuitive to profit, and we have to have a transition to the conceptualist society. The only way to do it fairly is as a social democracy, a radical social democracy, which isn't compromised by neo-liberalism and isn't compromised by the rich, and isn't compromised by hegemonic, authoritarian interests: to have that balance between the government, the private sector, and then the individual citizens again.

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.

Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather.

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

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.

I don't think that the Scots are happy to drift into Britain becoming the poorest of the poor, sub-American 51st state.

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.

Here ah am in the junky's limbo; too sick tae sleep, too tired tae stay awake. A twilight zone ay the senses where nothing's real except the crushing, omnipresent misery n pain in your mind n body.

You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too.

I'm not interested in details that might get someone into trouble. I'm more interested in generalities rather than the particulars, as a journalist would be. Names, dates and times don't interest me at all. I'm interested in feelings and emotions. Most people are game, once they realize that you're on the level as far as that's concerned and you're not about exposing them, then they feel quite free to talk about it. Police officers and social workers are no exception.

I think that in the future, as more and more money and wealth goes to the 1 per cent, it's going to polarize into the people who are for and anti-freedom. It's not that they'll have a left and a right wing thing, it's going to be a freedom and anti-freedom polarization, I think.

When you think about what Homo sapiens are about, you almost feel that we are replacing ourselves. We won't be able to breathe and breed on this earth, so we replace ourselves with androids that can do. The androids can go up into space and take the future of humanity forward because maybe we just bow out with a carbon-based epoch.

In some ways, you can say that at any time in any writer's career: 'He might have run out of ideas.'

When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.

There's no one way of telling a story or looking at reality, so I think any device is up for grabs as long as it fits in with the tone.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.

When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that's there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You've got to have some kind of proper interface for people that's not about the screen.

I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be. I believe in the class war. I believe in the battle of the sexes. I believe in my tribe. I believe in the righteous, intelligent clued-up section of the working classes against the brain-dead moronic masses as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie.

It's interesting - you had [George] Osborne crying at [Margaret Tatcher] funeral. She would have been the first person, she would have read these tears as being as fake as the smiles of his predecessors when they knifed her in the back.

I've always felt really good about England. I've always felt really, really good about Britain.

People go to the big urban centres because they have a quality of life, a quality of intellectual inquiry in the big urban centres that you don't necessarily have in smaller, rural communities. I've got loads of friends and relatives that live there. People like living there, bringing up their kids there and all that stuff, but it'd be the death of me. I couldn't be in a small town, ten minutes I'd enjoy it, and then I'd get fed up because you're so constrained and constricted by it.

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.

As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.

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.

If there's very strong civic unrest you can see a strong party of the Right emerging, whether it's UKIP [The UK Independence Party] or an even further-right party.

When you start off with your first book, people assume that you're like all the characters in the book - and it does complicate things, when you're being constantly bombarded with it, but you have to embrace it.

He emphasised basic truths: you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are. Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. I didn’t believe that at the time, but now I do. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.

I think that Europe has to get its act together very quickly. The Belgian guy who's leading the negotiations against Brexit, he sees it as a whole chance to reboot Europe and reclaim the kind of social mission of Europe from all this corporate, bureaucratic, globalist stuff that has got into, building Europe for the people rather than the banks, again.

If the media is just a cheerleader for an authoritarian populist, who isn't that popular, then we're in a sorry state. The media has to be critical - it has to scrutinize it, it has to call out things.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

Their [BBC] idea of bipartisanship is to try not to offend the Conservative party, try not to offend the Labour party.There is no analysis of anything beyond that, and these two parties are exactly identical, following the same Neoliberal policies for thirty years. And it's no criticism outside of that, it's just that there's basically sectarian pandering to these two individual parties, these two individual organisations. They still make a lot of great programmes and do a lot of great things, but there's not much political analysis happening broader to that.

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.