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

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

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

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

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

" The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are. "

" 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. "

" '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? "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

" I had a happy childhood. "

Happy Childhood

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level. "

" My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other. "