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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. "

Irvine Welsh

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" You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it. "

" Rebellion is always going to fascinate, as it's always packaged in a very safe way. "

" It's ironic that the growth of Scottish nationalism has precipitated in the English the sort of hand-wringing the Scots have always done over who they are. "

" Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set. "

" Writing has been handed to me on a plate. "

Irvine Welsh

Plate

Writing

" It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element. "

" People in Scotland want the parliament but don't give a toss about the elections. "

" Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales. "

" 'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new. "

" Politicians are so... detested; they don't actually walk amongst people now. "

" In America, Miramax are using a 'New York Times' review that said 'Trainspotting' makes 'Kids' look like a 1960s episode of 'Sesame Street.' "

" When you grow up in a place, you always think it's mundane. Then you travel around and live in different places, and you realise that you've got it the wrong way 'round. "

" I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction. "

Irvine Welsh

Nonfiction

Writing

" Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown. "

" 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. "

" Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that's changing. "

" I'm the worst employee in the world. I'll cheat and steal time and resources from my employer, although I'll con everybody into believing I'm essential to the operation. "

" If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction. "

" I go to the gym and work through a routine. But if you see someone with a personal trainer, you know they do 10 times more than you do. You give up your sense of identity. If you watch 'The Biggest Loser,' you see people give up their identity to become something else. "

" 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. "

Irvine Welsh

Political

People

" It's very hard to transgress; we have the furniture of transgression without the imagery and iconography to actually do it. "

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

" Dean Owens is Scotland's most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter. "

" The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool. "

Irvine Welsh

You

Someone

" 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. "

" Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level. "

" 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. "

" We've become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there's a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There's so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you. "

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

" I think what you call 'metropolitan America' - as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles - I think there's more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there's the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It's more formulaic. "