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" I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success. "

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" My relationships are fairly stable. "

" Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach? "

" If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s. "

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

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

" If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book. "

" When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English? "

" If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it. "

" 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. "

" However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself. "

" 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. "

" My computer is littered with abandoned projects. "

" There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.' "

" 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 think I became less literary after I sold more! "

" 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. "

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

" I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college. "

" There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration. "

" I think firmly that art is no use to anyone unless it offers some kind of consolation or hope. "

" I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't. "

" 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. "

" It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were. "

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

" The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes. "

" I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough. "

" Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay. "

" 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. "

" Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one. "

" I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home. "