Irvine Welsh Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n aw. That's it; end ay fuckin story.
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It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead.
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The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.
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Filmmaking is a much more collaborative thing than literature, so you know you're going to be working with a group of people at the start. You know it's going to be a compromise.
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I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.
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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.
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Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather.
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I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.
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What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.
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There is a kind of mysticism to writing.
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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.
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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.
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That beats any meat injection … that beats any fuckin cock in the world … Ali gasps, completely serious. It unnerves us tae the extent that ah feel ma ain genitals through ma troosers tae see if they're still thair.
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I would never have written 'Trainspotting' if it hadn't been for this album, 'Raw Power,' and 'Metallic K.O.'
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The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.
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Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set.
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Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.