Filmmaking is a much more collaborative thing than literature, so you know you're going to be working with a group of people at the start. You know it's going to be a compromise.
— Irvine Welsh
As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.
We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling.
In my flat in Chicago, I've got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by.
I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.
I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.
You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.
From 'Trainspotting' to 'Acid House,' I moved from urban realism into fantasy.
That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.
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.
I'm the worst employer I could wish for because I push myself hard.
I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.
Historically, men have a hard time getting onboard with feminism, but I think that's changing.
I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?
It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.
It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.
Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.
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.
People either think I'm this totally savage, idiot-savant genius guy who's lucked out or they think I'm a super-manipulative crafty businessman, this kind of MBA guy who's spotted a gap in the market and knows how to create a product for it. It's flattering, but I've not got that much of a gameplan.
I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.
It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.
I just love the weather. I live on Miami Beach, which is all boutique hotels and cocktails. I do sometimes go along to smart parties in my white suit, but I wouldn't really recognise any famous people if they were there because I'm not very good at star-spotting.
Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.
The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.'
I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence - laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter.
I'm the worst employee in the world. I'll cheat and steal time and resources from my employer, although I'll con everybody into believing I'm essential to the operation.
Sometimes a book influences me because it winds me up. There'll be something that gets under my skin and makes me think that I can do better.
We have to give feminism a shot. Out of sheer self preservation, we have to stand aside and let women run the show.
I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.
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.
I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.
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 you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.
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.
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.
I used to sit on the Circle Line and go 'round and 'round and write.
It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M.
The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.
So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle.
A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.
Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.
When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid £17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set.
Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.
'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.
I just want to get on and tell stories.
When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.
It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead.
It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.
