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" Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. "

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" Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed. "

" With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine. "

" I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up. "

" Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care. "

" From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness. "

" As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read. "

" My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. "

" I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there. "

" I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. "

" Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable. "

" Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing. "

" I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier. "

" B is for bestseller. "

" I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away. "

" Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone. "

" Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene. "

" No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone. "

" Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves. "

" At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. "

" Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well. "

" I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them. "

" I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people. "

" I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious. "

" I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride. "