All I want to do is make sure that I continue to try to exploit the potential I have.
And we hardly need ever go to the stadium to watch every game live, because they're all on TV.
Books are long. Even mine. You don't want to feel bad about them as you're writing them.
But Arsenal fans are probably in two minds about it all, because the last decade has been the best of our lifetimes. We've seen fantastic football, and we've seen our team win a lot of trophies.
But I reserve the right to write the kinds of books I feel like writing.
But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.
English authors are very content to write for a very small audience, and I think that shows.
Even at the beginning of the 90s people in England stood on the terraces to watch British players who would almost certainly need a job of some kind when they retired.
Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
Fever Pitch was obviously and entirely autobiographical.
Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.
I came away with the idea that I'd like to write books the way people write screenplays. I think I'm not going to let another line go through unexamined.
I could, I think, write a literary novel, but I have no desire to - even my bleakest book has some jokes in it, and I'd feel nervous writing a book with no jokes.
I didn't mind High Fidelity being set in Chicago at all.
I do like to read, but, you know, it's hard, and I do like watching telly, and I do like sport, and reading has to fight for its place within that.
I don't think of "High Fidelity" as a real hip book.
I don't think that most songwriters can ever anticipate quite what their songs are going to mean to people.
I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
I don't worry too much about what I am, what I do, what I want to do.
I get excited about having finished a new book.
I have a really low boredom threshold.
I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids.
I reckon 75% at least of a book has to be omitted from the screen version, and there's no point in agonizing about this once you've taken the money.
I start with a fragment of narrative, or a character, something that seems to have resonance for me and which allows me to explore the kinds of themes I'm interested in.
I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. They're not getting anywhere, and nobody's listening to them. You do get frustrated.
I think English literature has gotten really bogged down over the last few years.
I write the books I want to write, and readers will either respond or not respond.
I'm all for peace and harmony between the sexes.
I've been very lucky with all my adaptations - they were made by intelligent people who liked the books, and I know that not all authors feel this way.
I've never particularly wanted to read a football novel.
If you're a best-selling writer, then they just want to chuck the book out there, because people will buy it anyway.
In other words, it's too tough to be a musician at the moment.
It's more that, as my writing career goes on, I simply want to extend the range of people I'm writing about.
Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.
Most of the work, the jokes and the observations and the smaller narrative episodes, come with the actual writing rather than with the preparation.
On top of that, I'm pretty sick of working on the books by the time they're published.
Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.
Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.
So the domestic novel can accommodate, should accommodate, a lot of extremity.
The degree of examination that goes on in film is very interesting for a writer, because there's not a line that goes unchallenged in a script.
The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
The process you have to go through to get a book published is quite difficult, because books are judged by essentially serious-minded people.
There's a hundred million different ways of writing, and it takes you a long time to sort through that stuff. And I think it takes anyone a long time to find a voice.
These things that I write about, not only have I experienced them but they are unavoidable. If you're any kind of human, you are going to have relationships.
We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?
When I wrote Fever Pitch, I felt that I could represent the typical fan, but the success of the book changed my relationship with the club.
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