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.
I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'
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.
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.
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.
I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.
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.
I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.
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.
Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
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 that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That's always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places.
Writing is such a good thing to do because you can't really get bored with it. If you're bored with writing, you're bored with life.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.