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

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, "Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death." Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.