Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

[About a tiresome colleague]: He could bore for Scotland.

You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.