Irvine Welsh Quotes

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.