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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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 a failed musician rather than a successful writer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think what you call 'metropolitan America' - as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles - I think there's more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there's the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It's more formulaic. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

" We've become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there's a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There's so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you. "

" 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 just want to get on and tell stories. "

" 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. "