I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead.
I am interested in silences.
No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can’t walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you’re telling a story you’re telling it into someone’s ear.
We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.
I’ve heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. ‘The Gathering’ did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
You write a book and you finish the book. That’s your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don’t know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.
I’m very keenly aware that there aren’t very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find – blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.