110+ Irvine Welsh Quotes On Culture, Friendship And World

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. He is best known for his novel Trainspotting, which was later made into a film of the same name. His work is marked by a raw Scots dialect and brutal depiction of Edinburgh life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Irvine Welsh on life, culture, love.

Top 10 Irvine Welsh Quotes

1. 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.
2. Choose life … I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?
3. His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.
4. But even Es and cocaine, over the years they blow holes in your brain, rob you of your memories, your past. Which is fair enough, convenient even.
5. don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another
6. The inspiration can come in such small ways that if you sit there just waiting for the big epiphany you'll sit there for the rest of your life.
7. I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.
8. The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.
9. Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.
10. Everything in the street today seems soft focus.

Irvine Welsh Short Quotes

• Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.
• I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.
• I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.
• It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.
• It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.
• I used to sit on the Circle Line and go 'round and 'round and write.
• It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.
• The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.
• I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.
• Hugo Boss is my kind of label.

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Life

Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That's always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places. — Irvine Welsh

That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life. — Irvine Welsh

Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically. — Irvine Welsh

Writing is such a good thing to do because you can't really get bored with it. If you're bored with writing, you're bored with life. — Irvine Welsh

When you're in your twenties, it's the last time you have the chance to experiment with multiple identities, to decide who you're going to be in life. — Irvine Welsh

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

It was quite life-affirming, for me, that I felt hat kind of pity for [Margaret Thatcher], because I didn't think I ever would. — Irvine Welsh

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

When you're not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others. — Irvine Welsh

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Culture

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

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. — Irvine Welsh

It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead. — Irvine Welsh

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

I think that a lot of people on the left are gonna get tired of fighting gun laws, so they're gonna embrace gun culture. I think when that happens, you've got serious, serious trouble. — Irvine Welsh

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

People should be able to express their culture without getting into all that chauvinistic thing. — Irvine Welsh

The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks. — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Love

I just love the weather. I live on Miami Beach, which is all boutique hotels and cocktails. I do sometimes go along to smart parties in my white suit, but I wouldn't really recognise any famous people if they were there because I'm not very good at star-spotting. — Irvine Welsh

People love talking about their jobs. Take them out, buy them lunch or take them for a beer and they'll talk about their job, provided they know that you're going to respect their anonymity. — Irvine Welsh

Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them. — Irvine Welsh

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots. — Irvine Welsh

I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

Irvine Welsh Quotes About World

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

I'm the worst employee in the world. I'll cheat and steal time and resources from my employer, although I'll con everybody into believing I'm essential to the operation. — Irvine Welsh

We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling. — Irvine Welsh

I've eaten ice cream from all over the world, but until you've tasted Graham's from Geneva, Illinois, you haven't had ice cream at all. — Irvine Welsh

People are really excited by Obama abroad because he seems to be the first American presidential candidate who has ambition to go out of the country. In a sense, with the power of globalization, you are kind of electing the leader of the Western world to an extent. — Irvine Welsh

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

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Writing

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

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel. — Irvine Welsh

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books. — Irvine Welsh

There is a kind of mysticism to writing. — Irvine Welsh

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

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card. — Irvine Welsh

I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that. — Irvine Welsh

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it. — Irvine Welsh

I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.' — Irvine Welsh

I think the silences we have on some issues are inductive of the fact that we need to write about them more, but I think there are some issues you have to write in a sensitive way and in a way that respects the reality of the situation. If you can't do that, you should leave them alone. — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About People

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element. — Irvine Welsh

We've become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there's a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There's so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you. — Irvine Welsh

I go to the gym and work through a routine. But if you see someone with a personal trainer, you know they do 10 times more than you do. You give up your sense of identity. If you watch 'The Biggest Loser,' you see people give up their identity to become something else. — Irvine Welsh

In my flat in Chicago, I've got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by. — Irvine Welsh

If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction. — Irvine Welsh

Politicians are so... detested; they don't actually walk amongst people now. — Irvine Welsh

The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.' — Irvine Welsh

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.' — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Time

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time. — Irvine Welsh

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

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

Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that's changing. — Irvine Welsh

You know, people tend to get stereotyped for about forty percent of their behavior, so if you're completely crazy forty percent of the time you'll get stereotyped as crazy, even if you're totally boring thirty percent of the time and just studious the other thirty percent of the time. — Irvine Welsh

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

These days you can't write anybody off. If anybody is a right-wing populist, you can't write them off now because that is the rising tide of our time. — Irvine Welsh

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

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have. — Irvine Welsh

I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme. — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Think

Sometimes a book influences me because it winds me up. There'll be something that gets under my skin and makes me think that I can do better. — Irvine Welsh

The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more. — Irvine Welsh

I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment. — Irvine Welsh

As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

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. — Irvine Welsh

If it's something that I feel uncomfortable with, that's a reason for me to write it. I kind of like to make myself feel uncomfortable. I think if you're starting to feel uncomfortable with something when you're writing it, that's the reason really to push on with it. — Irvine Welsh

I think UKIP [ UK Independence Party] and the BNP [British National Party] are very, very English concerns. If they gather strength they're going to add to this schism between Scotland and England. — Irvine Welsh

I think what you call 'metropolitan America' - as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles - I think there's more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there's the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It's more formulaic. — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Quotes About Book

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel. — Irvine Welsh

You know what it's like: you don't want to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you would do differently. — Irvine Welsh

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

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

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are. — Irvine Welsh

I have a lot of successful musician pals, and as I get older, I find that I'm lucky to be a writer. I have great anonymity compared to musicians who sell the same number of records as I do books. — Irvine Welsh

I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence. — Irvine Welsh

When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them. — Irvine Welsh

You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness. — Irvine Welsh

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence. — Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

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. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society. — Irvine Welsh

Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind. — Irvine Welsh

I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself. — Irvine Welsh

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

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

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

I mean Filth is the best British film since Trainspotting. It might even be better. I keep watching it back to back with Trainspotting to try and work out which is the best. I can't split them. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. — Irvine Welsh

Good luck to progressive candidates in U.S. Senate elections against the usual rich, white, racist, women-hating pricks they run against. — Irvine Welsh

I've been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing. — Irvine Welsh

From 'Trainspotting' to 'Acid House,' I moved from urban realism into fantasy. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

In America, Miramax are using a 'New York Times' review that said 'Trainspotting' makes 'Kids' look like a 1960s episode of 'Sesame Street.' — Irvine Welsh

Are you asking me or telling me? — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown. — Irvine Welsh

It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but ah fear that this internal sea is gaunnae subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in ma body. — Irvine Welsh

I'm not really interested in courting controversy, but I am interested in exploring issues that other people would deem to be controversial. — Irvine Welsh

I grew up in what was not so much a familyas a genetic disaster. — Irvine Welsh

[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

I just want to get on and tell stories. — Irvine Welsh

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

It's ironic that the growth of Scottish nationalism has precipitated in the English the sort of hand-wringing the Scots have always done over who they are. — Irvine Welsh

I'm not really a mainstream novelist! — Irvine Welsh

When you go away, you see where you come from in a different light. I see Scotland, and the rest of Britain, as much more exotic than I used to. — Irvine Welsh

It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers. — Irvine Welsh

Thir must be less tae life than this — Irvine Welsh

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

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

It's very hard to transgress; we have the furniture of transgression without the imagery and iconography to actually do it. — Irvine Welsh

For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board. — Irvine Welsh

A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes. — Irvine Welsh

Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set. — Irvine Welsh

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

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

Nothing is covered adequately by the BBC. The BBC has become the biggest disappointment - they're just so terrified. And in a way it's not their fault: the parties have used them as a political football. — Irvine Welsh

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

Rents once sais, thirs nothin like a darker skin tone tae increase the vigilance ay the police n the magistrates: too right. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence - laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter. — Irvine Welsh

The first job of a writer is to be honest. — Irvine Welsh

In America, we've got to get back to these base principles of what democracy is. — Irvine Welsh

Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Irvine Welsh

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

Life Lessons by Irvine Welsh

1. Irvine Welsh's work emphasizes the importance of being true to yourself and staying true to your roots, no matter how difficult it may be.
2. He also teaches us to recognize the power of connection and community, and how it can be a source of strength and support.
3. Finally, Welsh's work shows us the importance of being open to new experiences and perspectives, even if they challenge our existing beliefs and values.