We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.