If I stop working and publishing, and TV, and film and all that, I would be dead within a couple of weeks. I don't really have that kind of off-switch.

The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know.

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.

I don't see [ Trainspotting ] as an albatross, I see it more as a calling card. It's got me out to Hollywood, I've got a good agent, I've got a good manager, I'm getting a lot of work out there and doing a lot of stuff - getting a lot of film projects on the go.

The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.