As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.

Rents once sais, thirs nothin like a darker skin tone tae increase the vigilance ay the police n the magistrates: too right.

In America I think we need to move towards a social democracy, European-style basically, and I think that in Britain we do as well.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

It wis like auld times, but in a sense that only served tae remind us ay how much things hud changed.