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 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.
We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.
I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.
I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.
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.
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.
If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.
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.
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.
If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.
My computer is littered with abandoned projects.
With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.
The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person.
When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?
The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are.
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.'
I miss independent record stores very much.
The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.
