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" I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes. "

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" It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way. "

" Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives. "

" 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 quite gloomy. I just am one of those people, vaguely lugubrious. "

" 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. "

" With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made. "

" I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible. "

" You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to. "

" I think I am naturally depressive. "

" 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. "

" Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song. "

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

" I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely. "

" 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. "

" The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. "

" 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. "

" I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome. "

" People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with. "

" The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can. "

" The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel. "

" 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.' "

" I've never met anyone who is seriously bad. "

" '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. "

" Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over. "

" Screenwriting is about condensing. "

" I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them! "

" I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh. "

" I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did. "

" I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material. "

" We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness? "