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Irvine Welsh Quotes

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Famous Irvine Welsh Quotes

“You've got the whole stuff with transgender toilets and stuff like that - that's no way for a government to behave. We're supposed to be against ISIS, so why are we trying to slowly introduce a country-club version of Sharia law in America, you know? It doesn't make any real sense at all. I think there's going to be a lot of energy, there is already a lot of reaction against that - people are prepared to really stand up and be counted for democracy, and in the process to find out what is and what isn't.”

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Author:Irvine Welsh
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“We have to accept that capitalism is coming to an end. We can't provide paid employment for people, all the industries with technology are counter-intuitive to profit, and we have to have a transition to the conceptualist society. The only way to do it fairly is as a social democracy, a radical social democracy, which isn't compromised by neo-liberalism and isn't compromised by the rich, and isn't compromised by hegemonic, authoritarian interests: to have that balance between the government, the private sector, and then the individual citizens again.”

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“The thing about drugs is that it [dealing] gives people an income to deal with, and it also gives people a compelling drama in their lives that they used to get from the office and the factory, and they're no longer there. What happens if you have everything in the hands of the state, particularly in the line of an authoritarian state, they just give people drugs to keep them doped up, to keep them passive.”

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“People go to the big urban centres because they have a quality of life, a quality of intellectual inquiry in the big urban centres that you don't necessarily have in smaller, rural communities. I've got loads of friends and relatives that live there. People like living there, bringing up their kids there and all that stuff, but it'd be the death of me. I couldn't be in a small town, ten minutes I'd enjoy it, and then I'd get fed up because you're so constrained and constricted by it.”

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“The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.”

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“If you continue to transfer the wealth of the population of the planet to a very small amount of people, it becomes untenable at some point, a democracy, because people eventually will realize what's going on. You can only bulls - t people through kinds of media outlets for so long, and eventually you have to physically control them.”

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“I think that Europe has to get its act together very quickly. The Belgian guy who's leading the negotiations against Brexit, he sees it as a whole chance to reboot Europe and reclaim the kind of social mission of Europe from all this corporate, bureaucratic, globalist stuff that has got into, building Europe for the people rather than the banks, again.”

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“We were looking for someone who could get the film [Filth] made at that kind of level, with the finance we wanted, and we spoke to a lot of people. When I met James [McAvoy] in the Soho Hotel with Jon Baird, the director, he looked about ten years old. I thought there's no way he's going to be a forty-year-old divorced alcoholic cop. I thought, really lovely guy, I'll let him and John talk and see if they get on.”

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“I think that there are just so many people that can't afford not to have Obama win. He's gotten so many disenfranchised people back into the political system that if he didn't win, the disillusionment in America and the idea of more of the same failed policies of the last eight years [2000-2008], internationally and domestically, would be so bad for the country and the world as a whole.”

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“I'm not interested in details that might get someone into trouble. I'm more interested in generalities rather than the particulars, as a journalist would be. Names, dates and times don't interest me at all. I'm interested in feelings and emotions. Most people are game, once they realize that you're on the level as far as that's concerned and you're not about exposing them, then they feel quite free to talk about it. Police officers and social workers are no exception.”

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“I was in Athens for a football match when 9/11 went down, and it was quite spectacular - we went into this bar and tried to find out what happened, and the bartender said "it's only the American and the Arabs. They're not big football nations." So the feeling was, what's it got to do with us? Why are football games being cancelled in Europe? The intelligentsia in the West feel like they have to figure out the significance of it all, whereas people have other pressing concerns, related to basic needs.”

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“When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that's there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You've got to have some kind of proper interface for people that's not about the screen.”

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“People even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you're writing about the modern world. You've also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They're just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves.”

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“I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.”

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Book:The Acid House
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