If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

You know how if you're born in a certain situation you always expect your life to run on a steady trajectory? I've never really had a sense of that. I assume that life is going to go up and down.

I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.

If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don't notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime is finished. Then it hits you--the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It's like I've been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full." p. 265

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

I get really excited if I think I'm going to introduce somebody to a writer they haven't found before and I think they'll love. My favorite books to get as gifts are any that the giver is messianic about.