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" 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? "

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" 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. "

" My computer is littered with abandoned projects. "

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

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

" I miss independent record stores very much. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" I think firmly that art is no use to anyone unless it offers some kind of consolation or hope. "

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

" Screenwriting is about condensing. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" My relationships are fairly stable. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to. "

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

" 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. "

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