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I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.

In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.

I'm rather proud of having been a trainspotter.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

I've missed a lot of trains in my life, and another one always comes.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.