If you're a poet and you're using rhyme, rhyme generates ideas. If you're a songwriter and you're using melody and words together, they bounce off each other in interesting ways that you couldn't get otherwise, because you do things unexpectedly.

If you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands - because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities - you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.

Every lie creates a parallel world.. a world in which it is true

I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even.

When you tell filthy jokes as if they were all really serious, and happening all in the life of one family, it becomes a farcical situation. Imagine if you had a script that was imposed on your life - we all do in a certain way, from society, or family, the need to make money, biology, death. But you will have a certain latitude, or freedom, to read the script in your own way.

I enjoy the optimism of design, even though we can see it as doomed. But I'm telling most people that I'm not writing about design any more this year. It makes no sense at all during the recession unless you write about sustainable or ethical design-very basic things, like how to get clean water in countries with a shortage of it.

Pablo Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.