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" Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Dean Owens is Scotland's most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter. "

" You know what it's like: you don't want to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you would do differently. "

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

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

" 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 would never have written 'Trainspotting' if it hadn't been for this album, 'Raw Power,' and 'Metallic K.O.' "

" I just want to get on and tell stories. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The first job of a writer is to be honest. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set. "

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

" It's very hard to transgress; we have the furniture of transgression without the imagery and iconography to actually do it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I make out a play list for every character and buy the records they would listen to; it helps me find their personas. What they play, where they stay, who they lay, is my matrix for character development. "