My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

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

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.