"Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books"
About this Quote
Welsh slices through the romantic myth of the “born writer” with the kind of blunt, class-conscious clarity Britain loves to pretend it outgrew. “Basically” and “it’s a hegemonic thing” do a lot of work here: he’s not offering a personal grievance but naming an operating system. The point isn’t that talented people are missing from literature; it’s that access to the conditions of talent-making is rationed. Time, quiet, books, and the confidence that your voice belongs on the page are not evenly distributed resources. They’re class perks disguised as neutral prerequisites.
The phrasing “leisure classes” is deliberately old-fashioned, almost Veblen-esque, and that’s the sting. It implies a continuity between the genteel world of letters and the older aristocratic economy of who gets to think, to read, to be “cultured” for a living. “They can afford the time and the books” sounds mundane, even boring, which is precisely the rhetorical trick: the gatekeeping isn’t always a conspiracy; it’s daily logistics. Rent, shifts, childcare, stress, cramped housing - these are structural edits that delete paragraphs before they’re written.
Context matters with Welsh: Trainspotting didn’t just arrive as a novel, it arrived as a rupture, insisting that working-class speech and lives weren’t raw material for someone else’s refined prose. His intent is to expose literature’s class pipeline - and to dare readers to notice how often “taste” is just money laundering itself as merit.
The phrasing “leisure classes” is deliberately old-fashioned, almost Veblen-esque, and that’s the sting. It implies a continuity between the genteel world of letters and the older aristocratic economy of who gets to think, to read, to be “cultured” for a living. “They can afford the time and the books” sounds mundane, even boring, which is precisely the rhetorical trick: the gatekeeping isn’t always a conspiracy; it’s daily logistics. Rent, shifts, childcare, stress, cramped housing - these are structural edits that delete paragraphs before they’re written.
Context matters with Welsh: Trainspotting didn’t just arrive as a novel, it arrived as a rupture, insisting that working-class speech and lives weren’t raw material for someone else’s refined prose. His intent is to expose literature’s class pipeline - and to dare readers to notice how often “taste” is just money laundering itself as merit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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