Irvine Welsh Quotes

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

I'm always interested in writing. I keep music in journals on an everyday basis. I'm always looking for ideas that can be music.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.