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

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" 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. "

" I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money. "

" 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. "

" With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special. "

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

" I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't. "

" I always thought 'Of Mice and Men' was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. "

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

" 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. "

" I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in. "

" I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons. "

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

" One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time. "

" I think I am naturally depressive. "

" 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. "

" If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life? "