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

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

" The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are. "

" We don't feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we're not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.' "

" The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen. "

" 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? "

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

" If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job. "

" 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? "

" I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right. "

" '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. "

" At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times. "

" Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is. "

" I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that. "

" I think it's weird when you become rich at 40. "

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

" 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. "

" Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. "

" Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways. "

" Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty. "

" 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. "

" My computer is littered with abandoned projects. "

" Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. "

" I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought. "

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?' "

" In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up. "