I don't think that the Scots are happy to drift into Britain becoming the poorest of the poor, sub-American 51st state.

I think there is a natural thing that you feel when you've written something taboo because you just don't want to expose the people you're close to.

I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.

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.

Here ah am in the junky's limbo; too sick tae sleep, too tired tae stay awake. A twilight zone ay the senses where nothing's real except the crushing, omnipresent misery n pain in your mind n body.

It's crazy for somebody who's kind of empowered and wealthy like myself to say, "Oh, I don't need to be patronized by the state, I can make my own choices." But I've got things to look forward to, and places to go and if that'd been me there forty years ago, when I was a young kid in Muirhouse, it might've been a different story.

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?