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" 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. "

Irvine Welsh

Power

People

Hurt

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Irvine Welsh

Same

Always

" 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. "

" Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process. "

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Music

Helps

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that. "

Irvine Welsh

Standard

Talking

" It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead. "

Irvine Welsh

Almost

Nothing

" It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there. "

Irvine Welsh

Still

Immersed

" 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. "

" When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. "

" 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. "

" When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme. "