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

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

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

" I miss independent record stores very much. "

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

" I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record. "

" 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 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. "

" If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s. "

" With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made. "

" 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. "

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

" The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. "

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

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

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

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" I think I am naturally depressive. "

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