I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.

I was on the dole once. I loved it. It was only for a couple of years, when I was 20 or 21 and playing in a band. Back then, this was something young folk did - you got your rent paid, a little bit of money to live on, and you loafed around, wrote songs, rehearsed and dreamed of playing Wembley Stadium.

As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I'm fairly robust in my views on there. I get next to nothing in the way of trolling. Most women I know who regularly come close to expressing an opinion get trolled constantly. This is a men-on-women issue. Guys are pretty much doing it to the girls.

When I went into the computer shop to change my last laptop, the 19-year-old kid behind the counter looked at my six-year-old model and described it as 'vintage.' 'Vintage?' I wanted to scream. 'Son, I've got shirts older than you! I own underpants that have seen more of the world!'

I have an iPhone. I like it for the camera and the fact that you can have your email and Twitter and all that stuff in one place. However, unlike most men I know, I hate buying new technology.

I don't do sports, and my idea of hell is being dragged around ruins/museums/famous buildings, so I guess I'm a beach bum.

I quite like the Queen. Now, this must come as a fairly amazing statement for someone who is avowedly left wing, pro-independence and anti-monarchy, but there you go.

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

I use computers and the Internet every day of my life, and yet I have absolutely no idea how they work. I'm like a labrador watching 'The Matrix.'

I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4.

Future generations of economists will look at the trickle-down theory in much the same way we now look at witch burning, slavery, and the Sinclair C5.

I understand that some people like certain things more than others, but by the time you are an adult, you really should be able to sit down and eat pretty much anything.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

As a writer, that moment every few years when I buy a new laptop and find out that all the word processing stuff has slightly changed again (stuff I spend every working day using) is like getting into bed at night and finding some mad robot where you expected your wife to be.

I have to confess to not being a great forward planner. I'm the kind of person who regularly arranges to have dinner with five different people on the same night.

You know that thing where you repeat a word over and over until it just sounds like utter gibberish? That's what doing a day of press on a film is like. Ten interviews in a row, all asking pretty much the same questions until you find yourself giving pretty much the same answers.

I'm something of a black belt at break-ups. I have had two long-term relationships in my life, both of 10 years, both resulting in children, and both very much over. Things end. It is how you manage them being over that's key.

From everything I can read about Aussie spiders, it seems like all they really like doing is hiding in your house or garden or car until you 'accidentally' disturb them - probably by doing something crazy like putting on the shoe they are lurking in - and they can officially bite you to pieces.

I love England. I live and work here. My children have grown up here. I see no conflict between this and praying that my countrymen in Scotland never have to live another day under Conservative rule from London.

America has the largest nuclear capability in the world. All this power neither prevented 9/11 nor helped to avenge it. How could it? Who would America have attacked?

It has long been known that if you want to see me turn into a raging, snarling beast, then all you have to do is use any combination of the words 'chill out,' 'chilling,' or - my maximum red rag - 'chillax.'

I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.

I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place - the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don't. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.