'True Detective' was the last show I got crazy about, with its 'Silence of the Lambs'-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America.

I would never have written 'Trainspotting' if it hadn't been for this album, 'Raw Power,' and 'Metallic K.O.'

Dean Owens is Scotland's most engaging and haunting singer-songwriter.

I go to the gym and work through a routine. But if you see someone with a personal trainer, you know they do 10 times more than you do. You give up your sense of identity. If you watch 'The Biggest Loser,' you see people give up their identity to become something else.

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

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

I think what you call 'metropolitan America' - as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles - I think there's more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there's the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It's more formulaic.

We've become used to processing images that are part of the non-linear narrative theory. I think there's a thinner line between fantasy and normality. People spend much more time in their own heads now. There's so much to conform to, so many influences coming at you.

I just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me.

I have a lot of successful musician pals, and as I get older, I find that I'm lucky to be a writer. I have great anonymity compared to musicians who sell the same number of records as I do books.