Latest Irvine Welsh Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm quite comfortable now with being misunderstood. I don't really feel the need either to pander to it or to refute it. Just go on, and do what I've got to do.

  Irvine Welsh

  Misunderstood, Needs, Goes On

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Book, Character, People

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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

  Irvine Welsh

  People, Preconceptions

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Book, Hands, Film

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Writing, Character, Reality

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Reality, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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.

  Irvine Welsh

  Book, People, Long

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• People even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you're writing about the modern world. You've also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They're just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves.

  Irvine Welsh

  Writing, People, Elements

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I was in Athens for a football match when 9/11 went down, and it was quite spectacular - we went into this bar and tried to find out what happened, and the bartender said "it's only the American and the Arabs. They're not big football nations." So the feeling was, what's it got to do with us? Why are football games being cancelled in Europe? The intelligentsia in the West feel like they have to figure out the significance of it all, whereas people have other pressing concerns, related to basic needs.

  Irvine Welsh

  Football, Europe, Games

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Most people in the West are not politicized. They're the most simplistic consumers - they're animals, basically.

  Irvine Welsh

  Animal, People, West

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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.

  Irvine Welsh

  Parent, Generations, Firsts

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Thinking, Shopping, Guy

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Jobs, Class, People

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Choices, Over You, Inheritance

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Identity, Lasts, Twenties

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Crazy, People, Boring

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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

  Irvine Welsh

  Thinking, Korean, Scots

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• The readers get younger all the time, and we're getting older.

  Irvine Welsh

  Getting Older, Reader, Getting Old

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.

  Irvine Welsh

  Book, Evoke, Valuable

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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.

  Irvine Welsh

  Games, Names, People

  Interview With Veronica Bond, gapersblock.com. October 15, 2008.

• You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.

  Irvine Welsh

  Writing, People, Stuff

  Interview With Veronica Bond, gapersblock.com. October 15, 2008.

• 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

  Jobs, Beer, Talking

  Interview With Veronica Bond, gapersblock.com. October 15, 2008.

• 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

  Nice, Book, People

  Interview with Alissa Strother, gapersblock.com. October 15, 2008.

• 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

  People, Drug, Festivals

• Just lock myself in a room, stop answering emails, stop answering the phone and I come out with something.

  Irvine Welsh

  Phones, Answering The Phone, Locks

  Source: gapersblock.com