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" If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. "

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" My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world. "

Black And White

" I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "

" All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. "

" I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it. "

" I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction. "

" Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself. "

" The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper. "

" Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. "

" I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. "

" If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. "

" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "

" It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. "

" Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. "

" It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. "

" I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. "

" Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page. "

" Don't confuse honours with achievement. "

" If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. "

" I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "

" A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. "

" I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. "

" Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. "

" Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. "

" It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.' "

" English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. "

" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "

" Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. "

" It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. "

" You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. "

" Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. "