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" I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a failed musician rather than a successful writer. "

" 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. "

" What worries me is the professionalism of everything. "

Professionalism

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 'True Detective' was the last show I got crazy about, with its 'Silence of the Lambs'-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America. "

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

" 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. "

" I go to the gym and work through a routine. But if you see someone with a personal trainer, you know they do 10 times more than you do. You give up your sense of identity. If you watch 'The Biggest Loser,' you see people give up their identity to become something else. "

" I'm not really a mainstream novelist! "

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

" Writing has been handed to me on a plate. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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.' "

" Hugo Boss is my kind of label. "