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

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

" I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success. "

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

" I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right. "

" 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. "

" 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 would like to have a go at TV. I think, especially when you have kids, that you spend a lot of time watching telly, and you think, 'How come I'm not doing that?' "

" When someone says they've read your book 15 times, you think, 'Well, you should read something else.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music. "

" I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely. "

" I used to be a teacher, and I know how difficult it is to strike a balance between focused conversation and an atmosphere which prevents creativity and thought. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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? "

" The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication. "

" Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one. "

" I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh. "

" 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. "

" All the Oscars stuff for 'An Education' was incredibly exciting, especially because it was such an underdog project - no one would give us the money for it, and we all nearly gave up because it wasn't getting anywhere, then suddenly a breakthrough and this really lovely film, which then took on a life of its own. "

" 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.' "

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

" I kind of stumbled on the material for 'An Education' and thought it would make a good movie, and one of the things that came out of that, for me, was that I learned that if you write a big part for a girl or a young woman, you get the opportunity to work with the best talent in the world. "