Aging & Wisdom Quote by Irvine Welsh

Welsh is puncturing the romantic myth of the writer as pure conduit: the solitary genius who just feels hard enough and the pages arrive. Coming from the author of Trainspotting, that’s a particularly pointed move. His brand of fiction looks anarchic on the surface - slangy, fast, chemically lit - but it’s powered by a forensic ear for systems: class, addiction, masculinity, austerity, the small bureaucracies that grind people down. The subtext is almost anti-muse: if you want to write convincingly about life under pressure, learn how pressure is manufactured.

His advice to “get other degrees” isn’t credential worship; it’s a pragmatic nudge toward contact with disciplines that train you to ask better questions. Social sciences teach you to interrogate motives and structures rather than just personalities. Arts degrees sharpen taste, form, and reference. Business, a sly inclusion, signals Welsh’s suspicion that money is one of the most underwritten forces in contemporary storytelling - and that writers ignore it at their peril. He’s arguing for a kind of applied literacy: knowing how to track down facts, parse competing accounts, notice who benefits from a narrative.

The line about research also reframes “finding information” as craft, not homework. Good research isn’t trivia-hoarding; it’s a way of earning authority on the page, of building worlds that feel lived-in because they’re argued with reality. In an era of misinformation and algorithmic noise, Welsh’s point lands with extra bite: the writer’s job isn’t just to express - it’s to verify, contextualize, and then transform.