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" I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. "

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" As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story. "

" The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility. "

" E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. "

" I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture. "

" I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. "

" To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once. "

" My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. "

" Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard. "

" Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery. "

" I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried. "

" The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us. "

" In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story. "

" The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. "

" I do public appearances. I'm bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes, and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on. "

" In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline. "

" I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged. "

" Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. "

" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "

" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "

" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "

" I wrote the first draft of 'Tigerman' while my wife was pregnant - needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time - and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us. "

" We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear. "

" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "

" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "

" A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride. "

" Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring. "

" We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales. "

" I wanted a pseudonym partly because I'm quite shy and private. I know that sounds ludicrous, but if I should be lucky enough to make a hit, I wanted to be able to shrug off the mantel of Nick Harkaway when I got home. "

" We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context. "

" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "