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Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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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
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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
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Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.
Irvine Welsh
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I'm a failed musician rather than a successful writer.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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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
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Ah thought that every cunt over twenty was a toss an no worth speakin tae, until ah hit twenty. The mair ah see, the mair ah think ah wis right. After that it's aw ugly compromise, aw timid surrender, progressively until death.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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'True Detective' was the last show I got crazy about, with its 'Silence of the Lambs'-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America.
Irvine Welsh
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Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.
Irvine Welsh
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Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know?
Irvine Welsh
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He had noted that with older people. They often try to control younger, more popular and vivacious people; usually due to the fact that they are jealous of the qualities the younger people have and they lack. These inadequacies are disguised with a benign, protective attitude.
Irvine Welsh
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Funny scene, likesay, how aw the psychos seem tae ken each other, ken what ah means, likes?
Irvine Welsh
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Ah've never felt anything about countries, other than total disgust. They should fuckin abolish the lot of them. Kill every fuckin parasite politician that ever mouthed lies and fascist platitudes in a shell-suit and a smarmy smile.
Irvine Welsh
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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
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Rents once sais, thirs nothin like a darker skin tone tae increase the vigilance ay the police n the magistrates: too right.
Irvine Welsh
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That cunt Nietzsche wis wide ay the mark whin he sais ah wis deid. Ah'm no deid; ah jist dinnae gie a fuck. It's no fir me tae sort every cunt's problems oot. Nae other cunt gies a fuck so how should ah? Eh?
Irvine Welsh
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How many shots does it take before the concept ay choice becomes obsolete?
Irvine Welsh
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The rhetorical question, the stock-in-trade weapon ay burds and psychos.
Irvine Welsh
