Irvine Welsh Quotes

I always say film is art, theater is life and television is furniture.

Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.

If people are going to watch TV, let's give them something coherent with actual dialogue.

Rather than disliking theatre, I've expressed a preference for television because it tends to deal in its small way much more with issues and is able to reach a broader church of people than theatre.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling.

There's no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television's much better than movies.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

A movie is a movie and a book is a book, and they have different rules.

I have to write for everyone. What really fascinates me is how you make films or make stories that can genuinely be shared by different groups.

I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

I know that movies are basically meant to be entertainment, but I'm not that interested in entertainment.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

Great writing makes great television.

The challenge is to stay true to the characters while also having them be entertaining every day, because it turns out that just watching someone be true to themselves isn't that rad to watch.

Cinema has a greater impact as it leaves a long lasting memory. Television, on the other hand, is also good but requires a lot of time.

Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.

I spent a lot of time doing really unimportant work as an actor. It was important when I started writing that I obviously make it entertaining, or no one is going to go see it - but to really make you think, that is my goal.

I don't like movies, TV shows, or books or anything that's preaching to the audience or speaking down to us.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

There's a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.