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.

The inspiration can come in such small ways that if you sit there just waiting for the big epiphany you'll sit there for the rest of your life.

Everything in the street today seems soft focus.

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.

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.