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

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" Screenwriting is about condensing. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.' "

" I think it's weird when you become rich at 40. "

" I only want to write books and movies about women. "

" Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think I am naturally depressive. "

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

" Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. "

" I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir. "

" I miss independent record stores very much. "

" 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?' "

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

" 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. "

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

" Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over. "

" 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 spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them. "