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.

Their [BBC] idea of bipartisanship is to try not to offend the Conservative party, try not to offend the Labour party.There is no analysis of anything beyond that, and these two parties are exactly identical, following the same Neoliberal policies for thirty years. And it's no criticism outside of that, it's just that there's basically sectarian pandering to these two individual parties, these two individual organisations. They still make a lot of great programmes and do a lot of great things, but there's not much political analysis happening broader to that.

You can argue about violence. It's destructive, but people are inherently violent in a lot of ways. Abusing drugs is always bad for people and bad for society, but the whole notion of festival is tied up with intoxication.

Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather.

I think that a lot of people on the left are gonna get tired of fighting gun laws, so they're gonna embrace gun culture. I think when that happens, you've got serious, serious trouble.

In some ways, you can say that at any time in any writer's career: 'He might have run out of ideas.'

Conservatives are giving up on democracy because it's not efficient. They want an autocratic regime.