I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way.
— Nick Hornby
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.
My relationships are fairly stable.
The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.
I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college.
At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.
I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.
If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.
I think I became less literary after I sold more!
There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.
Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives.
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 think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success.
Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty.
I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh.
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.'
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.
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.
I'm really not a big rereader - I'm too aware of my own ignorance.
The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.
I miss independent record stores very much.
I used to go and see the Clash a fair bit. I did think they were dead cool, and very handsome.
I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.
I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.
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.'
The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.
It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that.
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.
I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.
If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life?
The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.
A lot of what 'Funny Girl' is about, for me, is the experience feeling very happy doing a certain thing with a certain group of people. That partly came about because of having really positive experiences writing movies.
I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life.
I think I am naturally depressive.
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.
With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.
It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.
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 couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record.
I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.
It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way.
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.
Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.
The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.
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 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.
Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.
Screenwriting is about condensing.
You can't really ask for anything more than to be working for your entire life - and to be doing something that some people respond to.
I applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once.
