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" Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. "

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" I think I am naturally depressive. "

" If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job. "

" I only want to write books and movies about women. "

" It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music. "

" I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought. "

" I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless. "

" The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication. "

" I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance. "

" It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. "

" Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. "

" Home was extremely normal. But my dad's life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home. "

" I kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world. "

" I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped. "

" I think it's weird when you become rich at 40. "

" It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that. "

" I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that. "

" One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time. "

" I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life. "

" When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun. "

" It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years. "

" I always thought 'Of Mice and Men' was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication. "

" 'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts. "

" I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language. "

" Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.' "

" Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person. "

" I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record. "

" I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right. "

" I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in. "

" Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do. "