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.
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
I can’t think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There’s more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what’s happened.
I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
I’m quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it’s actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
When I’m working, I’m not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can’t.
I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.
I write anywhere – when I have an idea, it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed; it really filled my day.
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.