[A friend] tentatively suggested including a glossary [in Trainspotting] so that posh people could understand words like barry, radge, swedgin, shan, biscuit-ersed, skaggybawed, shunky, spawny and donks.
"No way," [Welsh] says. "One thing I can't stand is these Merchant City yuppies with a copy of Michael Munro's The Patter next to their Filofax.  The last thing I want is all these fuckers up in Charlotte Square putting on all the vernacular as a stage managed thing.  It's nothing to do with them." Scotland On Sunday interview (August 8, 1993)

"It's always assumed that [Trainspotting] must be autobiography because you're a working-class writer.  It's assumed you cannae create characters, you cannae create fantastical situations.  That's absolute nonsense . . .  I've never actually put anybody in one of my books that I know." The Independent (April 23, 1995)

"I've got this friend who's been a junkie for 25 years.  He said to me when Trainspotting came out, 'Why have you written this book?  You've only been a junkie for five minutes.'"  Welsh's eyes dim for a moment.  "Well actually, it was 18 months."  He seems keen to go on.  "It was a stupidity and a weakness. I've not touched it for years, but it's in your vocabulary.  If something bad happens in your life, it's always there in the background, waiting for you to trip up." The Guardian (July 1998)

"I can't really say I've had a great deal of personal problems with drugs," he says eventually.  "The problems were caused by the procurement rather than the effects.  In your teens and your twenties you're not really aware of your mortality, you're just steaming in.  There's a tension when you write a book like this [Trainspotting], that people expect you to be either this big reformed ex-junkie voice-of-experience, which I don't think I am, or they think you are some kind of middle class voyeur looking in and writing an exploitation book about other people's misery, which equally I don't think I am.  Probably you could point to people in my past and they'd say: 'Oh, he was never into anything like that to that extent.'  Or get people saying: 'That bastard was much worse than any of the characters in the book.'" Scotland On Sunday interview
 (August 8, 1993)

Source: Andrew Crumey's "Scottish Writer's" webpage