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.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life

I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.

You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.