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

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" 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. "

" I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance. "

" I miss independent record stores very much. "

" Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty. "

" However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself. "

" 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. "

" 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 have boys, and boys are particularly resistant to reading books. I had some success recently with Sherman Alexie's great young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.' I told my son it was highly inappropriate for him and one of the most banned books in America. That got his attention, and he raced through it. "

" Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Screenwriting is about condensing. "

" 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? "

" When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.' "

" 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. "

" Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. "

" Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity. "

" 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? "

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

" The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes. "

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

" It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. "

" 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 think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless. "

" Home was extremely normal. But my dad's life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home. "

" We don't feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we're not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.' "

" The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading. "

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

" '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. "