Top 100 Irvine Welsh Quotes
#1. It wis like auld times, but in a sense that only served tae remind us ay how much things hud changed.
Irvine Welsh
#2. Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know.
Irvine Welsh
#3. When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.
Irvine Welsh
#4. His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life.
Irvine Welsh
#5. There's nothing worse than a violent beating from an unremarkable person. Physical violence with someone is too much like shagging them. Too much id involved.
Irvine Welsh
#6. 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.
Irvine Welsh
#7. I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs.
Irvine Welsh
#8. You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too.
Irvine Welsh
#9. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
#10. 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.
Irvine Welsh
#11. Money gives you the luxury of not caring about it. You can affect to find it crass and vulgar, but see how crass and vulgar it is when there's none of it in your pocket.
Irvine Welsh
#12. They mean well, and they mean well tae me, but there's nae way under the sun that they can
appreciate what ah feel, what ah need.
Protect me from those who wish tae help us.
Irvine Welsh
#13. His mind raced through past horrors experienced first hand and from the accounts of others. He mentally flipped through a grim database which contained everything from vegan flatmates to psychotic pimps.
Irvine Welsh
#16. I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.
Irvine Welsh
#18. we're not human any more. We've slipped out of our skins like lizards, shedding not just our pasts, but our futures.
Irvine Welsh
#19. A lot of men are wankers cause they don't mind bad sex, but for a woman bad sex is far worse than no sex at all.
Irvine Welsh
#21. It's all okay, it's all beautiful; but ah fear that this internal sea is gaunnae subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in ma body.
Irvine Welsh
#22. This thought though, is nowhere near sufficient tae stop us fae daein what ah huv tae dae.
Irvine Welsh
#23. Good luck to progressive candidates in U.S. Senate elections against the usual rich, white, racist, women-hating pricks they run against.
Irvine Welsh
#24. There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.
Irvine Welsh
#25. We're all like the slaves in the fields now, putting on the front that says 'Everything's fine, boss' while we worry about how to make ends meet.
Irvine Welsh
#27. But ah'm hugging Janey and thinking about how much a life can change in the time it takes tae fix up.
Irvine Welsh
#28. Another cunt oaf ma fuckin Christmas caird list.
-Didnae ken ye kept a list, likesay, Franco...
-Every cunt keeps a fuckn list. He taps his heid,
-A Christmas caird list, n that cunt's fuckin well oaf it!
Irvine Welsh
#30. But here, just at this point: this is limbo. There is the sense that if you stay at this point for too long, stop at this point of oblivion for a certain amount of time, you will just cease to exist. And we cannot move.
Irvine Welsh
#31. On the issue of drugs, we wir classical liberals, vehemently opposed tae state intervention in any form.
Irvine Welsh
#32. Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here ... it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.
Irvine Welsh
#33. The Victim was a chronic fuck-up. People Like her always seemed to hang out with The Poisonous Cunt. In turn, she kept their self-esteem low and made sure that they stayed in psychic immiseration. She was a curator of dead souls.
Irvine Welsh
#34. Her mum thought gourmet cooking was putting a load of fish fingers under the grill instead of in the frying pan.
Irvine Welsh
#35. I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.
Irvine Welsh
#36. The trick was to consume as quickly as possible; in doing it this way there was a sense that the body could be cheated.
Irvine Welsh
#37. Johnny wis a junky as well as a dealer. Ye hud tae go a wee bit further up the ladder before ye found a dealer whae didnae use. We called Johnny 'Mother Superior' because ay the length ay time he'd hud his habit.
Irvine Welsh
#38. Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done.
Irvine Welsh
#39. Mental burds; needy, crazy, strength-sappin n soul-destroyin, aye, but mair often than not barry fuckin rides.
Irvine Welsh
#40. We don't really communicate [ ... ]. We talk all right, talk in that strange language we've evolved for the purposes of avoiding communication. That non-language we've created. Perhaps it's a sign that civilisation is regressing. Something is anyway.
Irvine Welsh
#41. Might huv ehs ma's brains, cause ay his heid taperin backwards intae a point like a fuckin alien.
Irvine Welsh
#42. His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.
Irvine Welsh
#43. Any cunt withoot the virus could git run ower the morn. That's the wey ye huv tae look at it. Cannae jist cancel the gig. The show must go oan.
Irvine Welsh
#44. I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.
Irvine Welsh
#45. It was all that vain, egotistical insincerity of self-reproach. By blaming ourselves we take away the right of others to do the same
Irvine Welsh
#46. Was he an alcoholic? What was that? Someone who drinks all the time? Who can't say no to a drink? Who drinks in secret? Somebody who anticipates the next drink before he's finished with the one in front of him?
Irvine Welsh
#47. Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.
Irvine Welsh
#48. 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.
Irvine Welsh
#49. Ah realise now thit death is usually a process, rather than an
event. People generally die by degrees, incrementally. They rot away slowly in homes and hoespitals,
or places like this.
Irvine Welsh
#50. Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.
Irvine Welsh
#52. It's easy to love, or for that matter hate, somebody in their absence, somebody we don't really know...
Irvine Welsh
#53. Writing about drugs is like that though, isn't it? You can just tell when someone is writing about drugs and they've never really done them. It screams out at you. That's something where I believe you have to have been there to really get it, y'know?
Irvine Welsh
#54. No fuckin way: cunt dies when ah fuckin well say eh dies.
(Jim Frances Begbie as he is trying to resuscitate a friend who's having a stroke.)
Irvine Welsh
#55. I grew up in what was not so much a familyas a genetic disaster.
Irvine Welsh
#56. He really is a cunt ay the first order. Nae doubt about that. The big problem is, he's a mate n aw. Whit kin ye dae?
Irvine Welsh
#57. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?
Irvine Welsh
#58. It's easy tae be philosophical when some other cunt's got shite fir blood.
Irvine Welsh
#59. Now I'll be left alone, and that's all you want, all you crave out of life: to be left alone while you get on with the business of interfering with others. In
Irvine Welsh
#60. Mates are a waste of fucking time. They are always ready to drag you down tae their level of social, sexual and intellectual mediocrity.
Irvine Welsh
#61. You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt.
Irvine Welsh
#62. 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.
Irvine Welsh
#63. No ambition but to use up the big wages on more drink and more hopeless horses.
Irvine Welsh
#64. I like the idea of a black sun; like a black hole in space, sucking everything into darkness, where we came from and where we're heading
Irvine Welsh
#65. Sex generally makes them intae real relationships, or ends them. Ye go backwards or forwards after shagging, but maintaining the status quo is difficult.
Irvine Welsh
#66. ... Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless.
Irvine Welsh
#67. Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.
Irvine Welsh
#68. She's lovely and she's with Skinner, and they're probably in love and there's no justice in this world
Irvine Welsh
#69. I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.
Irvine Welsh
#71. Even evil bastards like Frank Begbie probabably attained an angelic innocence when they were out for the count.
Irvine Welsh
#72. She's nothing to do with my shit, but fuck it, none of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy.
Irvine Welsh
#73. Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.
Irvine Welsh
#74. This is what being alive's all about, all those fucked up feelings. You've got to have them; when you stop, watch out.
Irvine Welsh
#75. You can only learn through failure, and what ye learn is the importance ay preparation.
Irvine Welsh
#76. Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well.
Irvine Welsh
#77. This is a bit like being accused of shagging the sister ah don't have.
Irvine Welsh
#78. The black insect-dead eyes in her suety, pockmarked face gaze at him
Irvine Welsh
#79. Now, for the first time, he's seeing that there really is a way out of this, and it's all so simple. You don't have to run away. You just meet somebody special and step sideways into a parallel universe.
Irvine Welsh
#80. Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin miles off the pace
Irvine Welsh
#81. Here ah am in the junky's limbo; too sick tae sleep, too tired tae stay awake. A twilight zone ay the senses where nothing's real except the crushing, omnipresent misery n pain in your mind n body.
Irvine Welsh
#82. I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.
Irvine Welsh
#83. The fact that you use the term "cunt" in the same breath as "sexist", shows that you display the same muddled, fucked-up thinking oan this issue as you do oan everything else.
Irvine Welsh
#84. She's so fucking beautiful it don't bear thinking about. I could hardly keep my eyes on the fucking road. I sort of felt like I was wasting time whenever I wasn't looking at her face.
Irvine Welsh
#86. You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.
Irvine Welsh
#87. Everybody talks about being a writer, angel. If every novel conceived on a bar stool made it into print, there wood not be one tree left standing on God's green Earth.
Irvine Welsh
#88. There's nae reasoning wi some cats. You say 'reason', they mew 'treason'. Ken?
Irvine Welsh
#89. Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.
Irvine Welsh
#90. His mind was like a cruel prison, giving his captive soul a sight of freedom, but no more
Irvine Welsh
#91. - Ah nivir bother asking ma father who ah kin shag, ah idly observe.
- Glad tae hear it, Sylvia says in clipped tones as Ali stifles a giggle.
- Me neither ... groans Matty, - ... unless it's muh ma.
- That's only good manners, ah shrugs.
Irvine Welsh
#92. When I get home I take some sleeping pills and within what seemed like half an hour of unconsciousness it was Monday morning again.
Irvine Welsh
#93. It seems to go beyond our personal junk circumstances; a brilliant metaphor for our times.
Irvine Welsh
#94. Ah'm thinking about shoutin 'stop' but ah could never turn away at this point. If smack is as addictive as they say, then ah'm already aw the junky ah'm ever gaunny be.
Irvine Welsh
#95. 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
#96. We tend to be rather murky little ponds, containing many layers of suspended dirt and grime and our greatest depths are stirred by the strangest of currents.
Irvine Welsh
#97. Why did I join the force? I repeat, - Oh I'd have to say that it was due to police oppression. I'd witnessed it within my own community and decided that it was something I wanted to be part of, I smile.
Irvine Welsh
#98. No tears come, and it would be pointless, like trying to empty a reservoir of grief by drip feed. I'm being daft.
Irvine Welsh
#99. It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.
Irvine Welsh
#100. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.
Irvine Welsh
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
