Irvine Welsh Quotes

The reason I'm patriotic about Scotland is because I think it's been dealt a really hard hand. It's marketed the world over as . . . haggis . . . bagpipes. But no one ever puts anything back into it.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that's not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

Of course I am frustrated with regard to extreme poverty, to violence that never seems to cease.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

I may not remember the name of a book's author, but let it be clear, what I will not forget is the violence, the poverty and the desperation that Mexico is living through.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

I understand working-class culture, tribalism and the ethos of violence, so I make films about these things.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

What will it profit this country if we... put our man on the Moon by 1970 and at the same time you can't walk down Woodward Avenue in this city without fear of some violence?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of darkest England ... the submerged tenth: Is it then beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live.

Government in this country is made up of the landed interest, which alone has the right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye.

There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country … It were better for the nation if they were sold to the galleys or West Indies, than that they should continue any longer to be a burden and curse upon us.

The Minister of Lands, Sir, got his ideas as a boy when he saw the poor people [of Scotland] evicted from their houses in the most cruel manner and unable to get a place for their feet to stand upon except they went to cemeteries.

If it is held to be morally wrong and anti-social for one man to possess huge estates, which he may develop or not as he chooses, while hundreds of others nearby are relegated to landlessness, why should one people acquire, by similar accident of birth or achievement, a claim to an inordinate share of the good things of life and a right to exclude from them other less fortunate peoples, white, black, or yellow?

There are a large number of white people who never owned a foot of land, who never have been in possession of any property, not even a cow or a horse, yet who have been as true and devoted loyalists as anybody else.

Scottish nationalism has grown since we entered the European Union.

I started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.

I grew up during one of Northern Ireland's most complex periods.

You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

When it comes to Baltimore I want to say that it's actually a lot worse than what you see in 'The Wire.'