Choose life … I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

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.

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.

The readers get younger all the time, and we're getting older.

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.

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.

We were looking for someone who could get the film [Filth] made at that kind of level, with the finance we wanted, and we spoke to a lot of people. When I met James [McAvoy] in the Soho Hotel with Jon Baird, the director, he looked about ten years old. I thought there's no way he's going to be a forty-year-old divorced alcoholic cop. I thought, really lovely guy, I'll let him and John talk and see if they get on.