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.

I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.

The first of the Trainspotting crew to die. Out of the five of them like, Begbie, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and [Margaret] Thatcher. Who'd have thunk she'd have been the first to go? She was the invisible author of the book, really. She created the conditions and the hubris whereby that whole culture flourished.

We made the world uninhabitable for ourselves and it can only be inhabited by robots and androids.

You can't lie to your soul.

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.

There's no one way of telling a story or looking at reality, so I think any device is up for grabs as long as it fits in with the tone.