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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me. "

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

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

" Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" Rebellion is always going to fascinate, as it's always packaged in a very safe way. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm not really a mainstream novelist! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "