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.
Irvine Welsh
Boxing gives you such a good workout, although I've stopped sparring. When your hand speed goes, you're going to get caught, and you can't afford to take cumulative smacks on the chops when you're a writer.
It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.
We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show.
You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.
Hugo Boss is my kind of label.
In America, Miramax are using a 'New York Times' review that said 'Trainspotting' makes 'Kids' look like a 1960s episode of 'Sesame Street.'
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 think if you're working class, there has to be some fascist element underneath.
Rebellion is always going to fascinate, as it's always packaged in a very safe way.
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.
What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.
It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.
I'm not really a mainstream novelist!
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'm a failed musician rather than a successful writer.
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.
Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.
We've become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there's a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There's so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you.
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 tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.
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.
From 'Trainspotting' to 'Acid House,' I moved from urban realism into fantasy.
The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.
Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
People in Scotland want the parliament but don't give a toss about the elections.
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 enjoy the freedom of the blank page.
I'm probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr. Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn't appeal at all.
I've eaten ice cream from all over the world, but until you've tasted Graham's from Geneva, Illinois, you haven't had ice cream at all.
I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.
When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.
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.
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.
I make out a play list for every character and buy the records they would listen to; it helps me find their personas. What they play, where they stay, who they lay, is my matrix for character development.
Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically.
Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.
Dean Owens is Scotland's most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter.
The first job of a writer is to be honest.
I just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me.
A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes.
