Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Irvine Welsh

You

Yourself

Control

" When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them. "

Irvine Welsh

Town

Book

" The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel. "

" 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. "

" One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity. "

" I'm probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr. Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn't appeal at all. "

" The first job of a writer is to be honest. "

" I'm the worst employer I could wish for because I push myself hard. "

" When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid £17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set. "

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

Irvine Welsh

Plate

Writing

" Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other. "

" People either think I'm this totally savage, idiot-savant genius guy who's lucked out or they think I'm a super-manipulative crafty businessman, this kind of MBA guy who's spotted a gap in the market and knows how to create a product for it. It's flattering, but I've not got that much of a gameplan. "

" I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence. "

Irvine Welsh

People

" 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. "

" When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement. "

" 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. "

Irvine Welsh

Yourself

Circumstances

" 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. "

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

" Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process. "

Irvine Welsh

Music

Helps

" There's something about the modern era where it's very hard to transgress - we're all so online, easier to track by mobile phone - so you have people who do it on your behalf. "

" 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'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. "

" Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it. "

" The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.' "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more. "

Irvine Welsh

Home

Sitting

" I'm not really a mainstream novelist! "

" 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. "

" In my flat in Chicago, I've got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by. "