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

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" 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. "

" One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.' "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "