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" I'm not really a mainstream novelist! "

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" 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. "

" When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. "

" Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is. "

" 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. "

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

" Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M. "

" So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes a book influences me because it winds me up. There'll be something that gets under my skin and makes me think that I can do better. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show. "

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

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

" I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content. "

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

" I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself. "

" 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. "

" I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology. "

" 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. "

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

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

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