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" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "

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" I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "

" I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle. "

" Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself. "

" Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page. "

" All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. "

" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "

" I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "

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

" I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. "

" Don't confuse honours with achievement. "

" There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience. "

" My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity. "

" Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. "

" Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. "

" I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. "

" Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. "

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

" It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. "

" Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. "

" 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. "

" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "

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

" I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. "

" I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. "

" The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. "

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

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