Try to be accurate about stuff.
People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you’re not sure where you’ll end up or how you are going to be, and you’re looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I’m not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don’t have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.
The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.
Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised.
People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn’t. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That’s part of my trick. I don’t have that anxiety about meeting their needs.
I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you’re not writing.
There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
There are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts – they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.
There is nothing as tentative as an old woman’s touch; as loving or as horrible.
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.
Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it’s really crazy difficult to think you’re doing it as a team and to find out that you’re not actually part of a team.
I am interested in silences.