Author

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.

From Irvine Welsh

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

From 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.

From Irvine Welsh

It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

From Irvine Welsh

People either think I'm this totally savage, idiot-savant genius guy who's lucked out or they think I'm a super-manipulative crafty businessman, this kind of MBA guy who's spotted a gap in the market and knows how to create a product for it. It's flattering, but I've not got that much of a gameplan.

From 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.

From Irvine Welsh

I used to sit on the Circle Line and go 'round and 'round and write.

From Irvine Welsh

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

From 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.

From Irvine Welsh

Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.

From Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh

Notable Quotes

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