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

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what youre doing is not any kind of public show, until youre ready for it.

[Margaret Thatcher] was the invisible hand behind it. Without that, there'd be no Trainspotting and no Filth.

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?

It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. Wen all this is in your head it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed.

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.

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