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" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" People in Scotland want the parliament but don't give a toss about the elections. "

" It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America. "

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

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

" I just love the weather. I live on Miami Beach, which is all boutique hotels and cocktails. I do sometimes go along to smart parties in my white suit, but I wouldn't really recognise any famous people if they were there because I'm not very good at star-spotting. "

" I have a lot of successful musician pals, and as I get older, I find that I'm lucky to be a writer. I have great anonymity compared to musicians who sell the same number of records as I do books. "

" What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction. "

" What worries me is the professionalism of everything. "

Professionalism

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Dean Owens is Scotland's most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter. "

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