Quotes from Irvine Welsh

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

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

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.

I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?

It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.

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.

The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.

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.

How can you be inspired by Cameron and Miliband? These guys are just drabness personified.

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.

I make out a play list for every character and buy the records they would listen to; it helps me find their personas. What they play, where they stay, who they lay, is my matrix for character development.

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

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.

I'm not running away, I'm moving on.

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.

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.

Writing has been handed to me on a plate.

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

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.

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.

What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.

We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show.

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.

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