Irvine Welsh

“I'm probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr. Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn't appeal at all.”

“The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.”

“When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.”

“Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.”

“Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.”

“How can you be inspired by Cameron and Miliband? These guys are just drabness personified.”

“I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.”

“When you grow up in a place, you always think it's mundane. Then you travel around and live in different places, and you realise that you've got it the wrong way 'round.”

“It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.”

“It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.”

“Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.”

“Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?”

“We kissed for a bit and I stopped shaking. We played with each other for a long time, and after we had joined, my cock and her fanny became one thing, then it seemed to vanish as we took off on a big psychic trip together. It was our souls and our minds that were doing it all; our genitals, our bodies, they were just launch pads and were soon superfluous as we went around the universe together on our shared trip, moving in and out of each other’s heads and finding nothing in them but good things, nothing in them but love. The intensity increased until it became almost unbearable and we exploded together in an orgasmic crash-landing onto the shipwreck of a bed, from a long way out in some form of space. We held each other tightly, drenched in sweat and shaking with emotion”

“I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'”

“Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.”

“Hugo Boss is my kind of label.”

“I feel like I've exhausted guys and male friendships.”

“Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.”

“From 'Trainspotting' to 'Acid House,' I moved from urban realism into fantasy.”

“Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set.”