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.

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

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 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.

To make the fastest progress, Be an absolutely cheerfulHero-warriorAnd take both victory and failureAs parallel experience riversLeading to the sea Of progress-delight.

I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

Never build after you are five and forty have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick and always calculate the expense at double the estimate.

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

It's when we become afraid of everything and worried about everything that you are never going to reach your highest potential.

Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested.

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.

I'm helping launch the new Milky Way Chocolate Ice Cream Bar. I play an astrophysicist on television, and the name of the bar is Milky Way, so put two and two together, and here I am.