Irvine Welsh Quotes

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

Sometimes we can't see our own selves, our own shortcomings, but it's so easy to see somebody else's.

I've always liked the idea of memoirs, going into someone else's life, going through someone else's day and getting out of your own head.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

I think, reading about yourself through somebody else's eyes, you're always going to have your own story.

When I started soul-searching, I tapped into the old me and what I grew up around. I learned a lot about myself, and it really made me appreciate my upbringing.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

People are a lot more open than even they think they are. And I feel like I carry a heavy story about where I come from and those roots, but also what I like as a thinker.

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

It was actually fun to write [memoir], because I went back to interview people my parents had taught or who had worked with them, and I learned a lot about them that I hadn't known.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.