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" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "

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" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "

" People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time. "

" 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. "

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" Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. "

" I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical. "

" You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. "

" When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. "

" 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. "

" Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. "

" English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. "

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

" There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way. "

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

" 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. "

" That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise. "

" A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. "

" Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. "

" 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. "

" Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. "

" 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. "

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

" English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. "

" I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. "

" 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. "

" The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. "

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

" I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do. "

" 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. "

" One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search. "

" 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. "