Nick Hornby
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.
It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.
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.
If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.
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.
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 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 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 can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.
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.
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.
I think I am naturally depressive.
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 applied for a job on 'Melody Maker' once.
I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life.
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.'
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.
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 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.
Screenwriting is about condensing.
The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.
Whether I am writing about a man or woman makes no difference in terms of difficulty.
Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.
If you're 22 and got everything you want, what are you going to write about for the rest of your life?
I think it does everybody a lot of good to have a period of no success.
I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.
I think I became less literary after I sold more!
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.
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.'
If adults are not enjoying something they're doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.
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.
I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.
I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.
I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.
I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.
At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.
I couldn't imagine a list of 10 records that didn't contain a punk record - that didn't contain a Clash record.
I'd say I got into Marvin Gaye properly in college.
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.
The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.
It's a great relief that you're not as bad a parent as you thought you were.