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" 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. "

Irvine Welsh

Hard

Modern

Track

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" A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness. "

" I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships. "

" Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M. "

" There is a kind of mysticism to writing. "

" 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. "

" Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is. "

" 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. "

" Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information. "

" I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it. "

" 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. "

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

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

Irvine Welsh

Nonfiction

Writing

" I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.' "