Irvine Welsh Quotes

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

Being a monarchist, and fawning over those 'above' you, you must naturally despise those 'below' or on the same socioeconomic level as yourself, because that is how hierarchy worship works.

What's more condescending and corny than someone telling you how much more money they have than you and telling you basically, 'I don't care about poor people,' which is a large part of what you hear of corporate hip-hop on the radio.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.

I don't believe that killing the French model in order to become the U.K. or the United States overnight is the solution. You have a big debate on inequality there, and for our society, a lot of inequality would not be bearable.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.

Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It's beyond gentrification.

It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.

Yeah, it is particularly upsetting to be called, whatever it was, sneery, or a snob, given the background I have.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

I don't like class distinction, and there is far too much of that in England.

There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren't.