Irvine Welsh Quotes

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

I haven't become an American! Having a house in LA is just where the house is. It's just a convenience thing living there. I carry Wales around inside me. I'd consider moving back there one day. I never really left.

I missed my home - like the physicality of my home, I missed my friends and my family mostly and just hanging out and being in your home country - culturally it feels right and that is what I miss.

Of course, our roots are in Germany, it always will be the feeling of home.

While I was born in Singapore, I didn't actually grow up here. So I don't remember all that much.

Initially, I think I was eager to get off Staten Island and go away for school, that kind of thing. Then what you do maybe 10 years after that, you start maybe appreciating all the great things about the place you grew up. You can go back and enjoy it because you don't have that angst or sense of struggle to get away anymore.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I think being back in Australia has kind of helped a little bit because you just feel really comfortable around everyone, and it's the same environment that I've grown up in.

I was born in England, but India is the only place I feel at home.

We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I have great, fond memories of Canada. I feel that one day my bones will more than likely end up there.

Lacey didn't like it, even though he was born here, I understand. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn. He told the staff that they better prepare themselves to say goodbye to some of their friends.

I didn't appreciate Brooklyn until I left it.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped.

I was born in Peru, and we moved to Scotland when I was 15, but I've not lived here for a long time. But I would always say that I am Scottish, and Scotland is as close to a home as I have.

My first day in Chicago, September 4, 1983. I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here.

And so much of my life has been about returning home and longing for home, wanting my children to know about my roots. And I thought I can't be the only one to feel this way so I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.

I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's.

My mother told me when I left for college, 'Never forget your roots,' and I never have.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.