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" I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. "

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" 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. "

" 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 am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain? "

" For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time. "

" Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense. "

" I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely. "

" To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy. "

" I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since. "

" I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened. "

" There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives. "

" 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'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge. "

" I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from. "

" 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. "

" Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong. "

" I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural. "