When you think about what Homo sapiens are about, you almost feel that we are replacing ourselves. We won't be able to breathe and breed on this earth, so we replace ourselves with androids that can do. The androids can go up into space and take the future of humanity forward because maybe we just bow out with a carbon-based epoch.

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

I think of the women I know, and very few of them are obsessed with shopping, or with getting a guy - they want their own thing, they have their own network going on.

It's all been quite a revitalizing process for me, being out there in the States. It wouldn't have happened without Trainspotting.

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.

Now, for the first time, he's seeing that there really is a way out of this, and it's all so simple. You don't have to run away. You just meet somebody special and step sideways into a parallel universe.

These days you can't write anybody off. If anybody is a right-wing populist, you can't write them off now because that is the rising tide of our time.