Irvine Welsh Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Bruce, you're an ugly and silly old man. You're very possibly an alcoholic and God knows what else. You're the type of sad case who preys on vulnerable, weak and stupid women in order to boost his own shattered ego. You're a mess. You've gone wrong somewhere pal.

Irvine Welsh
They'd rather gie a merchant school old boy with severe brain damage a job in nuclear engineering than gie a schemie wi a Ph.D. a post as a cleaner in an abbatoir.

Irvine Welsh
There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.

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

Irvine Welsh
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
Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.

Irvine Welsh
I grew up in what was not so much a familyas a genetic disaster.

Irvine Welsh
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
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
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 really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.

Irvine Welsh
I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.

Irvine Welsh
I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be. I believe in the class war. I believe in the battle of the sexes. I believe in my tribe. I believe in the righteous, intelligent clued-up section of the working classes against the brain-dead moronic masses as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie.

Irvine Welsh
Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?

Irvine Welsh
Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.

Irvine Welsh
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
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
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
Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.

Irvine Welsh
It's nae good blamin' it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We can't even pick a decent vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by.

Irvine Welsh
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
Take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin miles off the pace. Ma dry, cracking bones are soothed and liquefied by ma beautiful heroine's tender caresses. The earth moved, and it's still moving.

Irvine Welsh