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" It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music. "

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" Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over. "

" The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir. "

" 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. "

" 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 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?' "

" Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.' "

" My relationships are fairly stable. "

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

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

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

" '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. "

" I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible. "

" Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. "

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

" One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time. "

" 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. "

" I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them. "

" We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness? "

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

" Screenwriting is about condensing. "

" I've never met anyone who is seriously bad. "

" Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine. "

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

" 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? "

" Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories. "

" I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh. "

" There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.' "

" 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 love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough. "