It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.

The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

It's all been quite a revitalizing process for me, being out there in the States. It wouldn't have happened without Trainspotting.

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.

[Ecstasy] had its flaws, but again it was shot on a low budget, and they did well. It's not in the same league as Filth.

When you're in your twenties, it's the last time you have the chance to experiment with multiple identities, to decide who you're going to be in life.

If I don't have something to do, I'm not the kind of person who can sit on a beach on holiday. I've got to go and check things out and see things and look at things, and have some kind of itinerary in my mind. I think that a lot of people who are, in some ways, successful are kind of like that.