The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
Nick Hornby
Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
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.
If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.
If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life?
Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.
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.
When most people come in from work, 95 percent of them reach for the remote control. Then they read before they go to sleep, to get off to sleep. They do that because reading feels like a duty, and TV feels like fun.
I think I am naturally depressive.
The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.
I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success.
The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are.
I think it's weird when you become rich at 40.
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 miss independent record stores very much.
It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.
Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.
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.
However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.
It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.
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.
The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.
I only want to write books and movies about women.
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.
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'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance.
I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday - I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn't.
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.
I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.
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?
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.
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.
If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.
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.
Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives.
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.
Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.
I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.
Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.
Screenwriting is about condensing.
The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.
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 I became less literary after I sold more!
My computer is littered with abandoned projects.
Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.
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.
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.
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.
I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome.
