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

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

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

" For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed. "

" I had a happy childhood. "

Happy Childhood

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I can write pretty much anywhere. "

" When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy! "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups. "

" If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is. "

" It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. "

" 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. "

" The words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' are literally the same - the flavor is the same, the educational level is the same. But you just know when to use maybe and when to use perhaps. I think it's because of this: You get to know the tastes or musical tastes of words themselves, and this informs your choice, whether you use them or not. "

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

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

" When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself. "

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "

" Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. "

" As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off. "