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

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" 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. "

" If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. "

" 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. "

" It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. "

" 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. "

" English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life. "

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

" I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible. "

" As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue. "

" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "

" 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 conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. "

" My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. "

" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "

" 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. "

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

" If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. "

" Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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