Irvine Welsh
I'm the worst employer I could wish for because I push myself hard.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.
The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.
I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.
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.
I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.
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.
It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.
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.
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 used to sit on the Circle Line and go 'round and 'round and write.
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.
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.
Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.
As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.
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.
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.
For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.
You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.
Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically.
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've been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing.
In America, Miramax are using a 'New York Times' review that said 'Trainspotting' makes 'Kids' look like a 1960s episode of 'Sesame Street.'
It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.
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.'
I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.
The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.
A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes.
There's something about the modern era where it's very hard to transgress - we're all so online, easier to track by mobile phone - so you have people who do it on your behalf.
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.
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.
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.'
Writing has been handed to me on a plate.
If you're going to do something that's going to cause offence to people, you're always going to get a reaction.
What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.
How can you be inspired by Cameron and Miliband? These guys are just drabness personified.
Politicians are so... detested; they don't actually walk amongst people now.
There is nothing, really, that I wouldn't write about, and I do write about a lot of grim things.
When you go away, you see where you come from in a different light. I see Scotland, and the rest of Britain, as much more exotic than I used to.
When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.
People in Scotland want the parliament but don't give a toss about the elections.