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" Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us. "

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" It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. "

" When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. "

" I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me. "

" 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. "

" I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. "

" All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it. "

" 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

" A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. "

" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you. "

" 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. "

" Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. "

" 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. "

" Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still. "

" My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. "

" The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. "

" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "

" Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? "

" I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. "

" World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?' "

" I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. "

" I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. "

" 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. "

" Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. "

" There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. "

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

" Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. "