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" A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points. "

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" 'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it? "

" I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment. "

" I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave. "

" I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers. "

" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. "

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "

" I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them. "

" I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. "

" The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. "

" There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why. "

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

" I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character. "

" People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK. "

" Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. "

" I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. "

" I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish. "

" Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made. "

" I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.' "

" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "

" Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. "

" I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. "

" Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon. "

" I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work. "

" Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. "

" I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going. "

" In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. "

" When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate. "

" When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. "

" I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents. "