Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too.

I'm not running away, I'm moving on.

The thing about drugs is that it [dealing] gives people an income to deal with, and it also gives people a compelling drama in their lives that they used to get from the office and the factory, and they're no longer there. What happens if you have everything in the hands of the state, particularly in the line of an authoritarian state, they just give people drugs to keep them doped up, to keep them passive.

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.

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.