If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.

If you think you are powerless, then you are

A new car is not going to change your life.

I'm very eclectic in my music tastes - anything from Nina Simone to Beethoven to Talvin Singh.

You know how if you're born in a certain situation you always expect your life to run on a steady trajectory? I've never really had a sense of that. I assume that life is going to go up and down.

The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.

I don't want to get hung up on what 'people,' that nebulous mass, think about me. That's the way to unhappiness, I think.

I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.

The earliest bird gets the worm only if the worm is stupid enough to show up.

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

I learnt to drive at around eleven years old. In an old jeep on a field in Colorado. There were lots of ditches. I could barely see over the steering wheel.

I did my own music videos, my own TV commercials.

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.

How much shall I be changed, before I am changed!

With some people, that love of music is just buried in them. It's so deep in them that they would play for free because they have to.

There is no real evil in life, except great pain; all the rest is imaginary, and depends on the light in which we view things

No person I have ever met, not even the most righteous or pure of heart, has gone without those times when faith recedes in the busy-ness of life.

Whatever happens, the path of virtue should not be given up.