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Comment from the book world in May 2014

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'The pantomime of being self-effacing'

23 May 2014

‘There's a paradox as a writer where you're encouraged to put everything of yourself in your books, to take things to the furthest extreme, to hold back nothing. But when you're talking in your own voice, you have to reassure people that you share their values and agree with them about everything and nobody need be perturbed by the content of the book because we're in this consensus about how we see each other and see art. It's not that I think I'm so great but, in England, if you don't go through the pantomime of being self-effacing then you're full of yourself. And I get sick of that.'

Ned Beauman, author of Glow and the youngest of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, in the Independent on Sunday.

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'The experience of reading a wonderful book.'

19 May 2014

‘Television is a fine medium and I love cinema more than most. I listen to music all the time and have been known to glance at the web too, but for me nothing quite compares to that moment when you read some marks on the page and think "yes, I know exactly what you mean".

With technology tapping us on our shoulder, it has become harder and harder to find the time and concentration to sit alone with a book, and it's not surprising that so many men have lost the habit of reading or never acquired it in the first place. But I passionately believe that nothing is quite as immersive, affecting or exciting as the experience of reading a wonderful book.'

David Nicholls

On writing about Thomas Cromwell - and success

12 May 2014

‘I think as you get older you realise you will die with projects unfinished. I have long been conscious about the fact that when you have the idea for a story that does not mean you are ready to write it. I wanted to write the Thomas Cromwell books right at the beginning of my career as a writer. He was not ready to come out into the light and I wasn't ready for him.

I never expected it (success) but it gave me great pleasure though because I saw it as a continuation of what I had been doing. Right from the first page, the first paragraph, it was like: "Ah! Now you see everything you have done was aiming at this." I think this project is the thing I could have done that nobody else could have done, if that doesn't sound too boastful.'

Hilary Mantel, two-time Booker Prize winner and author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in the Observer

‘Writing can be taught. The desire and will to do it cannot.'

5 May 2014

‘Writing can be taught. The desire and will to do it cannot.

‘Living the life of a writer means you're either starving in a garret or you're living a very leisured life. My lifestyle isn't middle class; it's upper class. I don't mean that in a smug way. I don't have the burden pf getting up and going to work. Writing is what I'd be doing anyway. That makes me feel very, very rich.'

Irvine Welsh, author of The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, in The Times