The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.

Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.