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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.

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

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

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

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

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

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.

I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.

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'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.

It was around the summer of 1982 when the drug problem really impacted. It became a lifestyle rather than a recreation. When you start lying and stealing, you cannot con yourself you're in control any more.

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.

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.

The first job of a writer is to be honest.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

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.

What worries me is the professionalism of everything.

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.

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.

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.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

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

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.

It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.

It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead.

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.

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

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.

I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.

I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?

I just want to get on and tell stories.

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

Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that's changing.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.

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.

The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.'

That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.

A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.

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

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.

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

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 been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

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.

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.

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

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

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.

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.

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

As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.

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