I think they're universal. With "Trainspotting" everybody went on about it being a drug thing and all that, but it was about the characters. I go to Tokyo or Moscow or New York and everybody says, "Oh, we know a Begbie, we know a Sick Boy," and I think if you get good characters they have universal application.

Franco Begbie, the Scotch-drinking, punching-and-kicking psychopath from "Trainspotting," is perhaps one of the most vivid characters to arrive in contemporary fiction for decades. He makes a cameo appearance in "Glue," along with some other characters from "Trainspotting."

I think you get a virtual-reality world in your head. It's like, if you want a nutter, instead of just writing one and having to go through all the characteristics, you think, well, I've just got Begbie. You know he's in the same place around about the same time, so why not just have him as the nutter rather than just create another one? It's also a bit of responsibility as well, for the community. It's not a big community so, if you create another nutter from scratch, the impression is that everybody in Leith is a nutter, which they're not. Let's just stick with Begbie for that walk-on part. The problem is when I go home to Edinburgh. Every nutter in Edinburgh thinks that Begbie is based on them. So I have to try to tell them no, no, no.

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How did you write "Trainspotting"?

I found a 1982 diary and that became the basis of "Trainspotting" really. It was all nonsense, it was all fiction. And I took a lot of notes when I was traveling on a Greyhound bus from New York to Los Angeles and that also became "Trainspotting." So it was a fiction of a fiction really. But that's what really kick-started the whole thing.

Were you surprised by its popularity?

Yeah, I was. I wasn't surprised that it got a lot of attention locally. I knew that the punters would like it because it is that sort of book, but I didn't think that the literati would like it and I didn't think it would travel as much as it has.

The film adaptation of "Acid House" will be released in the U.S. on DVD this August. It definitely deserves its R rating, with a lot of explicit language, drug use, sexual content and violence. You could even say it carries on where "Trainspotting" left off.

I thought, if we do "Trainspotting 2" it's just going to seem a bit crass. So, we've got license to just really go for it and not do an airbrushed film. A lot of the people in it are my mates who haven't acted before. We wanted to get people that didn't look like actors and really looked like real characters. It was never going to be a massive commercial film, but it was good to do a wee grungy kind of art-house film.

You make a cameo appearance in "Trainspotting" and again in "Acid House." Are you interested in getting more involved in cinema?

I can't act to save myself. The directors are pretty clever; they always give you a wee part if you want one because it stops you from criticizing the film if you don't like it. Not that I would anyway because I like both the films.

You've become an influence to a generation of writers. Who are your literary influences?

My influences are a lot of classic Scottish fiction. James Matthew Barrie was the first Scottish writer I read. I just read all the big Scottish writers like Alisdair Grey, Iain Banks and James Kelman and all that. American stuff as well, like Beat stuff: Burroughs, Kerouac, Bukowski. Modern American fiction as well, like Gary Indiana and Joel Rose. Southern writers like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Just about everything really. I'm influenced by Dostoevski and, not so much Tolstoy, but Tolstoy as well and even all the classic English stuff that you wouldn't think, like the Brontës and all that kind of stuff.

Why such a brief reading tour?

I really should spend more time over here. I'm over here for three weeks. I was talking to somebody who spent six weeks over here, doing a bit, and you can't do it. It just fucks you up. It means that you're talking about the book constantly for six weeks. Even after a few days I find myself becoming strangely autistic about it. I'll probably end up in the funny farm after just three weeks.

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