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

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.

Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.

Choose life … I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

It's interesting - you had [George] Osborne crying at [Margaret Tatcher] funeral. She would have been the first person, she would have read these tears as being as fake as the smiles of his predecessors when they knifed her in the back.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

Ah walk doon Hammersmith Broadway, London seeming strange and alien, after only a three-month absence, as familiar places do when you’ve been away. It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the wey things are in a dream. They say you have to live in a place to know it, but you have to come fresh tae really see it.