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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverbladden.

Today I'm thrilled to have with me in the studio, Nick Hornby.

His most recent novel is How to Be Good.

It's published by Riverhead Books.

And the previous novels include the celebrated

high fidelity, the wildly admired fever pitch, the very hilariously funny about a boy, and he has also

edited an anthology of contemporary American and British fiction called Speaking with the Angel.

All of those other books are available in paperback from Riverhead.

Now, you seem to be the first writer of your generation from England who seems to be raised on the American

sentence rather than the British sentence.

And I wondered when you began writing, did people scold you for the loss of that elegant oratund diction?

No, actually. I've never got scolded, and I don't think people have ever noticed that that's where it's come from, but it certainly has come from America.

I had a full start with my writing. I presumed that I couldn't write prose

because I couldn't write the English literary sentence.

Everything just came out sounding to me like a very bad essay.

So I started trying to write screenplay

...