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" I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. "

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" I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish. "

" When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. "

" The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are. "

" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "

" I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers. "

" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears. "

" A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice. "

" I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work. "

" My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other. "

" I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. "

" Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. "

" I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents. "

" I had a happy childhood. "

Happy Childhood

" I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave. "

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

" Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced. "

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

" Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level. "

" Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. "

" I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. "

" If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is. "

" When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate. "

" I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.' "

" As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off. "

" The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. "

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

" I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them. "

" Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups. "