Irvine Welsh Quotes

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from.

You have to live in order to have something to write about - you get caught up in moviemaking and celebrities and money, and it's very intoxicating, but it doesn't give you what you need as a writer. You have to do something else for that.

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

I write most of my stuff when I'm on a train or a plane, any mode of transport. I like trains because you hear this motoric rhythm and the scenery is great. You go into your own little world. You don't have to be anywhere else.

There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn't like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.