“A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes.”

“A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.”

“As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.”

“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.”

“Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.”

“Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.”

“Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.”

“Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That's always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places.”

“Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically.”

“Filmmaking is a much more collaborative thing than literature, so you know you're going to be working with a group of people at the start. You know it's going to be a compromise.”

“For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.”

“From 'Trainspotting' to 'Acid House,' I moved from urban realism into fantasy.”

“Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that's changing.”

“How can you be inspired by Cameron and Miliband? These guys are just drabness personified.”

“Hugo Boss is my kind of label.”

“I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'”

“I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.”

“I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.”

“I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.”

“I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?”

“I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.”

“I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.”

“I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.”

“I just love the weather. I live on Miami Beach, which is all boutique hotels and cocktails. I do sometimes go along to smart parties in my white suit, but I wouldn't really recognise any famous people if they were there because I'm not very good at star-spotting.”

“I just want to get on and tell stories.”

“I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.”

“I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence - laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter.”

“I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.”

“I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.”

“I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.”

“I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.”

“I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.”

“I think the silences we have on some issues are inductive of the fact that we need to write about them more, but I think there are some issues you have to write in a sensitive way and in a way that respects the reality of the situation. If you can't do that, you should leave them alone.”

“I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.”

“I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.”

“I used to sit on the Circle Line and go 'round and 'round and write.”

“I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.”

“I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.”

“If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction.”

“I'm a failed musician rather than a successful writer.”

“I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.”

“I'm probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr. Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn't appeal at all.”

“I'm the worst employee in the world. I'll cheat and steal time and resources from my employer, although I'll con everybody into believing I'm essential to the operation.”

“I'm the worst employer I could wish for because I push myself hard.”

“I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'”

“I'm working on a screenplay right now for the BBC, but I hope to have the decks cleared soon so I can get into the studio with my pals and put down some more tracks, try to get a strong dance single together.”

“In America, Miramax are using a 'New York Times' review that said 'Trainspotting' makes 'Kids' look like a 1960s episode of 'Sesame Street.'”

“In my flat in Chicago, I've got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by.”

“It was around the summer of 1982 when the drug problem really impacted. It became a lifestyle rather than a recreation. When you start lying and stealing, you cannot con yourself you're in control any more.”

“It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.”

“It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.”

“It's ironic that the growth of Scottish nationalism has precipitated in the English the sort of hand-wringing the Scots have always done over who they are.”

“It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead.”

“It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.”

“It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.”

“It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.”

“It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.”

“It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.”

“I've been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing.”

“I've eaten ice cream from all over the world, but until you've tasted Graham's from Geneva, Illinois, you haven't had ice cream at all.”

“Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.”

“People either think I'm this totally savage, idiot-savant genius guy who's lucked out or they think I'm a super-manipulative crafty businessman, this kind of MBA guy who's spotted a gap in the market and knows how to create a product for it. It's flattering, but I've not got that much of a gameplan.”

“People in Scotland want the parliament but don't give a toss about the elections.”

“People should be able to express their culture without getting into all that chauvinistic thing.”

“People think if you're working class, there has to be some fascist element underneath.”

“Politicians are so... detested; they don't actually walk amongst people now.”

“So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle.”

“Sometimes a book influences me because it winds me up. There'll be something that gets under my skin and makes me think that I can do better.”

“Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M.”

“Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.”

“Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.”

“Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.”

“That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.”

“The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.”

“The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.”

“The first job of a writer is to be honest.”

“The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.'”

“The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.”

“The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.”

“There is a kind of mysticism to writing.”

“There is nothing, really, that I wouldn't write about, and I do write about a lot of grim things.”

“There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.”

“There's something about the modern era where it's very hard to transgress - we're all so online, easier to track by mobile phone - so you have people who do it on your behalf.”

“'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.”

“Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.”

“We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show.”

“We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling.”

“What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.”

“What worries me is the professionalism of everything.”

“When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.”

“When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.”

“When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid ??17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set.”

“When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.”

“When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.”

“When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.”

“When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.”

“When you go away, you see where you come from in a different light. I see Scotland, and the rest of Britain, as much more exotic than I used to.”

“When you grow up in a place, you always think it's mundane. Then you travel around and live in different places, and you realise that you've got it the wrong way 'round.”

“Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.”

“Writing has been handed to me on a plate.”

“Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.”

“Writing is such a good thing to do because you can't really get bored with it. If you're bored with writing, you're bored with life.”

“You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.”

“You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.”