Irvine Welsh

“You can't lie to your soul.”

“We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel...”

“The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That's what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana's funeral, they want to scrutinise those who rea...”

“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 w...”

“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.”

“I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.”

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

“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.”

“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,...”

“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 characte...”

“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.”

“I just love the weather. I live on Miami Beach, which is all boutique hotels and cocktails. I do sometimes go along to smart parties in my white suit, but I wouldn't really recognise any fam...”

“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 t...”

“Boxing gives you such a good workout, although I've stopped sparring. When your hand speed goes, you're going to get caught, and you can't afford to take cumulative smacks on the chops when...”

“Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible...”

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

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

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

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