Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

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

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

I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.