The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.
— Nick Hornby
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.
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.
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 firmly that art is no use to anyone unless it offers some kind of consolation or hope.
It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.
My computer is littered with abandoned projects.
The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading.
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?
Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they're not the right person.
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.
When someone says they've read your book 15 times, you think, 'Well, you should read something else.'
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?
I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.
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 didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.
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 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 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 hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.
It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.
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.
I think the moment you're writing about somebody who's not exactly you, then the challenge is all equal.
Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.
I only want to write books and movies about women.
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.
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.
Jeremy Corbyn has proved popular with young voters in part because he has promised an end to austerity.
Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.
I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.
I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.
I'm quite gloomy. I just am one of those people, vaguely lugubrious.
Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.
I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.
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 it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.
One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time.
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.
In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.
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.
We don't feel duty-bound to get all the way through a TV program. If we're not enjoying it, we turn over. Movies, we tend to give more of the benefit of the doubt because they're only 90 minutes or two hours. But books, there is this thing of, 'It's a book. I've got to finish it.'
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.'
'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.
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.
If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job.
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.
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.
Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.
Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.
