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" Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song. "

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" I only want to write books and movies about women. "

" The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel. "

" I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome. "

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

" Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay. "

" 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 hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that. "

" I think the moment you're writing about somebody who's not exactly you, then the challenge is all equal. "

" I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with. "

" 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 write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right. "

" I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language. "

" You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to. "

" I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success. "

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

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

" Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach? "

" It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way. "

" It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that. "

" I think it's weird when you become rich at 40. "

" When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun. "

" I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college. "

" The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are. "

" At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times. "

" I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped. "

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

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

" If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it. "

" I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once. "

" Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is. "