We have to concentrate back on: Where is the money going? Where's it been going for the last thirty years? How do we start to redistribute the cake more evenly, and give people opportunities? That's as much about poor white people in West Virginia as it is about poor black people on the Southside of Chicago.

I think that Europe has to get its act together very quickly. The Belgian guy who's leading the negotiations against Brexit, he sees it as a whole chance to reboot Europe and reclaim the kind of social mission of Europe from all this corporate, bureaucratic, globalist stuff that has got into, building Europe for the people rather than the banks, again.

I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.

Most people in the West are not politicized. They're the most simplistic consumers - they're animals, basically.

The first job of a writer is to be honest.

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.

If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.