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" I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. "

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" English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life. "

" I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do. "

" I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me. "

" Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. "

" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "

" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "

" I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. "

" Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well. "

" Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still. "

" It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. "

" If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. "

" I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. "

" In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes. "

" A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. "

" Don't confuse honours with achievement. "

" I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. "

" Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. "

" There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience. "

" If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. "

" Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. "

" Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. "

" English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. "

" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "

" Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. "

" When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. "

" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "

" I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. "

" The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. "

" It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. "

" I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it. "