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

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

" I'm not really a mainstream novelist! "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "