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

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" I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material. "

" The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading. "

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

" The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication. "

" I think I am naturally depressive. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person. "

" I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance. "

" 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. "

" I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way. "

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

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

" Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives. "

" 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 kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world. "

" 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. "

" The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can. "

" I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money. "

" I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes. "

" It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years. "

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

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

" I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record. "

" 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 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. "