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.

I'm not really interested in courting controversy, but I am interested in exploring issues that other people would deem to be controversial.

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.

If you continue to transfer the wealth of the population of the planet to a very small amount of people, it becomes untenable at some point, a democracy, because people eventually will realize what's going on. You can only bulls - t people through kinds of media outlets for so long, and eventually you have to physically control them.

In America, we've got to get back to these base principles of what democracy is.

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

I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.