Top 160 Irvine Welsh Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Irvine Welsh

52. “I didn’t have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.”

— Irvine Welsh

53. “Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.”

— Irvine Welsh

54. “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

55. “That’s all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there’s no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.”

— Irvine Welsh

56. “Everytime ye go to jail, the probability ay ye ever becoming free fae that kind of life decreases. It’s the same every time ye go back tae smack. Ye decrease yir chances of ay ever bein able tae dae withoot it.”

— Irvine Welsh

57. “The train was nearly twenty minutes late, an excellent performance by British Rail standards.”

— Irvine Welsh

58. “It’s hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.”

— Irvine Welsh

59. “Ma best mate is possibly Tommy. Cares aboot things, aboot people; maybe just a wee bit too much for the kind ay world we’re compelled tae live in.”

— Irvine Welsh

60. “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

61. “N it’s fuckin well beyond violence, it’s beyond even sexual; it’s a kind ay love, a fuckin bizarre, vain-glorious self-adoration, way past the fuckin ego even. Ah’m findin somethin... ah’m... but it’s what bein a hard man is aboot; it’s a journey, a fuckin self-destructive quest tae find yir limits, cause they fuckin limits eywis come in the form ay a harder man. A big, stong, stiff-hard man whae can dae it for ye, whae can teach ye, show ye whaire ye stand, where yir fuckin parameters ur.”

— Irvine Welsh

62. “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

63. “Once you’ve been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it’s hard to talk about the weather.”

— Irvine Welsh

64. “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.”

— Irvine Welsh

65. “Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.”

— Irvine Welsh

66. “1926. The General Strike in Leith. You read all that and what they said then and you pure see what the Labour Party used to believe in – freedom for the ordinary cat.”

— Irvine Welsh

67. “Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.”

— Irvine Welsh

68. “It wis like auld times, but in a sense that only served tae remind us ay how much things hud changed.”

— Irvine Welsh

69. “We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”

— Irvine Welsh

70. “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

71. “As if the physical proximity can make up for the emotional distance.”

— Irvine Welsh

72. “You can only learn through failure, and what ye learn is the importance ay preparation.”

— Irvine Welsh

73. “This is a bit like being accused of shagging the sister ah don’t have.”

— Irvine Welsh

74. “Well Joe, the truth is that you’re not a bad guy, but you have been a bit mysogynistic and homophobic. So your punishment is to make you walk the earth as a homosexual ghost buggering your old mates and aquaitances.”

— Irvine Welsh

75. “Now most people would put this doon tae experience, ye always want what ye cannae have and the things that ye dinnae really gie a toss aboot get handed tae ye oan a plate.”

— Irvine Welsh

76. “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

77. “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

78. “I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.”

— Irvine Welsh

79. “There’s nae reasoning wi some cats. You say ‘reason’, they mew ‘treason’. Ken?”

— Irvine Welsh

80. “The trouble with people like him is that they think that they can brush off people like me. Like I was nothing. They don’t understand the type of world we’re living in now, all those menaced souls clamouring for attention and recognition.”

— Irvine Welsh

81. “The politics of the last twenty years in Britain are liars’ politics. The problem is we are ruled by the weak and the small-minded, who are too stupid to know that they are weak and small-minded.”

— Irvine Welsh

82. “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

83. “It’s mibbe nae mair vermin thin you or me, likesay... whae’s tae say what’s vermin... they posh wifire think people us ur vermin, likesay, does that make it right thit they should kill us, ah goes.”

— Irvine Welsh

84. “Women give more than men; young people more than their elders; people who appear to be of the most modest means seem more generous than the affluent looking.”

— Irvine Welsh

85. “Rents once sais, thirs nothin like a darker skin tone tae increase the vigilance ay the police n the magistrates: too right.”

— Irvine Welsh

86. “Football divisions were a stupid and irrelevant nonsense, acting against the interest of working-class unity, ensuring that the bourgeoisie’s hegemony went unchallenged.”

— Irvine Welsh

87. “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

88. “Mental burds; needy, crazy, strength-sappin n soul-destroyin, aye, but mair often than not barry fuckin rides.”

— Irvine Welsh

89. “But even Es and cocaine, over the years they blow holes in your brain, rob you of your memories, your past. Which is fair enough, convenient even.”

— Irvine Welsh

90. “Analysing novels meant ripping oot their soul and it destroyed my enjoyment of them. Ah couldnae allow masel tae be trained tae thing that way. Only by refusing tae study literature was ah able tae maintain ma passion for it.”

— Irvine Welsh

91. “It seems to go beyond our personal junk circumstances; a brilliant metaphor for our times.”

— Irvine Welsh

92. “I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn’t want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.”

— Irvine Welsh

93. “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 youre doing is not any kind of public show, until youre ready for it.”

— Irvine Welsh

94. “Her mum thought gourmet cooking was putting a load of fish fingers under the grill instead of in the frying pan.”

— Irvine Welsh

95. “USA. The land of the free; where you accent didn’t matter. But he supposed everybody related to it; movies, TV, fat-food, outlets, you grew up with it. Cultural imperialism. Yet no wonder everybody increasingly hated it: it was stupid, self-serving and so in-your-face that it was setting itself up to be despised.”

— Irvine Welsh

96. “Statistically speaking, he reflects, you’re more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else.”

— Irvine Welsh

97. “Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life.”

— Irvine Welsh

98. “That’s the beauty aboot being polis: it doesnae really matter whether or not everybody hates you, as long as they’re civil tae your face and can put up a good front. You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.”

— Irvine Welsh

99. “On the issue of drugs, we wir classical liberals, vehemently opposed tae state intervention in any form.”

— Irvine Welsh

100. “Un tizietto in tuta mi grida dal pianerottolo in alto che non dovrei stare qui. E’ la storia della mia vita. Sempre in un posto dove non dovrei stare.”

— Irvine Welsh